Urd

Urd is the first and eldest of the three Norns, the fate-goddesses who sit beneath the world-tree Yggdrasil and shape the destinies of gods and men. Her name, cognate with the old English wyrd, fate, means roughly that which became, and she keeps the past, as her sisters Verdandi and Skuld keep the present and the future.

Beneath the tree lies the Well of Urd (Urdarbrunnr), the most sacred of the wells at the roots of Yggdrasil, and Snorri tells that the Norns draw water from it each day and pour it, mixed with the clay of its banks, over the great ash to keep its branches from rotting, so that the tree of the world is sustained by the tending of fate itself. It is at the Well of Urd that the gods hold their daily council. As the norn of the past, Urd embodies all that has already been laid down and cannot be unmade, the accumulated weight of what has happened out of which the present and the future are drawn. The sources note that norns beyond the three also attend each birth, but Urd, who gives the well its name, stands foremost among them.

Urd's name has an unusually direct and famous afterlife in English literature. The Old English word wyrd, a close linguistic cognate of Urd's own name and originally carrying the same core sense of fate or what has come to pass, survived into Middle English and eventually gave the modern English word weird, which only shifted from meaning fate or destiny to meaning strange or uncanny in a gradual semantic drift over centuries. The clearest surviving link in this chain is literary: the three prophesying witches of Shakespeare's Macbeth are named in the play's stage directions and by other characters as the Weird Sisters, a phrase Shakespeare drew from earlier English chronicle sources, notably Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles, which themselves used weird sisters to translate or gloss a native British and Germanic tradition of fate-women descended, at some historical remove, from the same broad Germanic concept of wyrd, that is, of Urd, that the Norse sources preserve in fuller mythological form as one of the three Norns.

Shakespeare's witches are not a direct dramatization of Urd and her sisters, and the specific line of transmission between the Norse Norns and the English weird sisters passed through a long and imperfectly documented history of shared Germanic vocabulary and folklore rather than through any continuous, traceable literary borrowing, but the underlying etymological connection between weird, wyrd and Urd's own name is well established, giving a Norse goddess of fate an unlikely but linguistically genuine descendant in one of the most famous plays in the English language.