The three Norns, keepers respectively of past, present and future in the systematized form Snorri presents, belong to a broader and much older pattern found repeatedly across Indo-European mythology, in which fate is personified as a set of female figures, often three, who determine or measure out the span of a life. The Greek Moirai, Clotho who spins the thread of life, Lachesis who measures its length, and Atropos who cuts it, and the Roman Parcae who mirror them closely, present the clearest and best documented parallel, and Roman writers themselves sometimes equated the Fates directly with figures from the peoples they encountered, a habit that suggests how readily ancient observers recognized the same underlying pattern across different cultures.
The Norns share with their Mediterranean counterparts a specific and vivid image, that of spinning or weaving fate as a literal thread or cord: the eddic poem Helgakvida Hundingsbana I describes Norns twisting a cord of fate at the birth of a hero, fastening its ends to mark out the extent of his life, an image that maps closely onto the spinning imagery of the Greek and Roman fate-goddesses even though the two mythological systems developed independently over a very long period of separation. Whether this shared imagery reflects a genuinely common Indo-European inheritance, or similar human intuitions about fate independently producing similar poetic images in unrelated cultures, is debated among comparative mythologists, but the resemblance between Verdandi's Norse triad and the Greek and Roman fate-goddesses remains one of the most frequently cited examples of exactly this kind of cross-cultural parallel.