Urd

Urd is the first of the three Norns, the women who shape the lives of men, and her name means “what has come to pass”. The holy well beneath Yggdrasil where the gods hold their court every day, Urd's Well, bears her name.

In Voluspa the seeress sees the ash Yggdrasil standing ever green over Urd's Well, sprinkled with white clay, its dew falling into the valleys. From beneath the tree come three maidens rich in knowledge, Urd, Verdandi and Skuld, who carve signs on wood, lay down laws and choose the lives and fates (örlög) of the children of men. Snorri Sturluson's Gylfaginning places the well under the root of the tree that stands in heaven. The gods ride there across Bifrost each day to sit in judgment, and the Norns daily draw water and clay from the well and pour them over the ash so that its branches do not wither or rot. The water is so holy that whatever falls into it turns as white as the skin inside an eggshell, and two swans, the ancestors of all swans, feed there.

Her name comes from the Old Norse verb verða, “to become”, and is the same word as Old English wyrd, “fate”, from which the English weird descends. Reading Urd, Verdandi and Skuld as past, present and future rests on their names (Verdandi means “becoming”, Skuld “debt” or “what must be”); no medieval text spells it out. The image of Norns spinning threads comes from another poem, Helgakvida Hundingsbana I, where unnamed Norns twist the threads of the hero Helgi Hundingsbane's fate at his birth. Urd has no story of her own and never speaks, yet her word is final: the late poem Fjolsvinnsmal says that no one can speak against it, and the Christian skald Eilif Godrunarson, quoted by Snorri, said that Christ sits “south by Urd's well”.