The Proto-Indo-European verbal roots that underwrite the Norns are not decorative etymologies. They are the generative engine of the ambiguous itself. The central stem is *wert-, “to turn, to twist, to writhe.”¹ From this single root the entire architecture of becoming, of fate as completed or ongoing turn, and of the double movement that English later names “ambiguous” is derived. To recover the root is to recover the mechanism by which language can face two directions at once, and therefore the mechanism that must be fixed before it can be slain.
*Wert- belongs to the class of primary verbal roots that describe physical rotation and, by extension, any irreversible change of state. Its basic meaning is the act of turning around an axis or of twisting a flexible material.² In the daughter languages this physical sense expands into the domain of time and necessity. The Proto-Germanic continuation is *werþaną, “to become, to turn into.”³ The perfective result of that becoming is *wurdiz, the form that appears in Old Norse as Urðr and in Old English as wyrd.⁴ The present-participial process is preserved in Verðandi. Thus the two senior Norns are not personifications imposed upon an abstract concept of fate; they are the morphological tense-forms of the same Indo-European verb of turning. What has turned is Urðr. What is still turning is Verðandi. The language does not merely name the process; it is the process conjugated.⁵
The same root supplies the first element of the compound that becomes English ambiguous. *Ambhi-wert- is the act of turning on both sides, of twisting in two directions simultaneously.⁶ The resulting adjective does not describe neutral complexity; it describes a deliberate refusal of single orientation. In the register of this book that refusal is the signature of the figure who has borne many names across the traditions under examination. The satanic language is the language that writhes, that multiplies faces, that cannot be struck because it is already moving in the opposite direction. The Norns inherit and institutionalize that writhe. Their speech is the laying-down of ørlǫg, itself built on a second root, *legʰ- “to lie, to lay,” whose Germanic form *lagjaną produces both the laws and the act of establishing them.⁷ Fate is therefore the laid-down result of a prior turning. The double movement is grammaticalized.
A third root, *skel-, “to be under obligation, to owe,” generates the third Norn. Proto-Germanic *skulaną yields *skuldiz, the debt that must be paid because the turning has already occurred.⁸ Skuld is not an independent invention of future time; she is the necessity that follows from the completed and ongoing turns of wert-. The future is the claim that the past and present have already written. When Skuld also appears among the Valkyries, the same root of obligation is extended into the selection of the slain. The continuum between Norn and Valkyrie is possible only because both offices are exercises of the same Indo-European complex of turning and binding.⁹
The foundational poetic statement of this complex appears in Vǫluspá 20. Presented here in interlinear form so that each Old Norse word stands immediately beside its English equivalent:
Þaðan (Thence)
koma (come)
meyjar (maidens)
margs (much)
vitandi (knowing)
þrjár (three)ór (from)
þeim (that)
sal (hall)
er (which)
und (under)
þolli (the-tree)
stendr (stands)
Urð (Urðr)
hétu (they-called)
eina (one)
aðra (the-second)
Verðandi (Verðandi)
skáru (they-scored)
á (on)
skíði (wood)
Skuld (Skuld)
ina (the)
þriðju (third)
þær (they)
lǫg (laws)
lǫgðu (laid)
þær (they)
líf (lives)
kuru (chose)
alda (of-men)
bǫrnum (for-the-children)
ørlǫg (fate)
segja (they-speak).¹⁰
Thence come the much-knowing maidens, three from the hall that stands beneath the tree. One they named Urðr, the second Verðandi—they scored upon the wood—Skuld the third. They laid down laws, they chose lives for the children of men, they speak ørlǫg. The word ørlǫg is itself a compound of intensifying ør- and lǫg, “that which is laid.”¹¹ Fate is the laid-down result of the turning. The verbs move from perfective past (lǫgðu, kuru) to present (segja), enacting the temporal writhe that the names already encode. The same root wert- that produces the ambiguous also produces the Norns who speak the law of becoming.¹²
Snorri’s prose expansion in Gylfaginning 15 places the three in a fair hall beneath the ash beside the well and states that they shape the aldr—the lifespan, the growth—of men. He adds that there are many more norns, some of divine kin, some of elven, some daughters of Dvalinn.¹³ The plurality is not a softening; it is a multiplication of the turning. In Fáfnismál 13 the dying dragon tells Sigurðr that the norns are sundrbornar, sunder-born, of no single race.¹⁴ The language of fate is already fragmented, already capable of facing more than one direction. Other roots reinforce the structure. The verb of choosing that appears in Vǫluspá as kjósa continues Proto-Germanic *keusaną, from an Indo-European stem *ǵeus- or *ḱeus- “to choose, to taste, to select.”¹⁵ The Norns choose lives; the Valkyries choose the dead. The act ofselection is itself a decisive turn. The possible connection of norn to a root of twisting or secret speech further embeds the image of the thread that is spun and therefore can be spun in more than one direction.¹⁶ Even if that etymology remains provisional, the dominant verbal system is already sufficient: *wert-, *legʰ-, *skel-, and the root of choosing together produce a language in which fate is never static and never singular.
The English inheritance makes the continuity visible. Weird preserves wurdiz. Worth and become continue the same verbal complex. Versus and version keep the sense of turning. Ambiguous keeps the double turn.¹⁷ The modern speaker who uses any of these words is still inside the morphological field that the Norns inhabit. The satanic register of polysemy and equivocation is therefore not a late rhetorical corruption; it is the mature expression of an Indo-European verbal idea that the North elevated into cosmic office and that English still carries in its ordinary lexicon.
To explore these roots is to map the terrain on which the ambiguous stands. The turn can be named. The double movement can be fixed long enough for the clarifying blow. The Norns remain beneath the tree, their names still conjugated from wert-, yet the grammar that once writhed without remainder can now be made to yield a single, accountable face. That recovery is the necessary preliminary to the act this book names: the slaying of the ambiguous.
Notes
¹ Rix, LIV, 691–92.
² Watkins, American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, 99.
³ Orel, Handbook of Germanic Etymology, 456.
⁴ de Vries, Altnordisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 635; Bosworth and Toller, Anglo-Saxon
Dictionary, s.v. “wyrd.”
⁵ Bek-Pedersen, Norns in Old Norse Mythology, 76–82.
⁶ Pokorny, Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 1156; Oxford English Dictionary, s.v.
“ambiguous.”
⁷ Orel, Handbook, 234; de Vries, Altnordisches, 367.
⁸ Rix, LIV, 552; Orel, Handbook, 338.
⁹ Faulkes, Edda: Prologue and Gylfaginning, 18; Dronke, Poetic Edda, vol. 2, 17.
¹⁰ Neckel and Kuhn, Edda, 5; Dronke, Poetic Edda, vol. 2, 12.
¹¹ de Vries, Altnordisches, 419.
¹² Bek-Pedersen, Norns, 80–81.
¹³ Faulkes, Edda, 18–19.
¹⁴ Neckel and Kuhn, Edda, 183.
¹⁵ Rix, LIV, 166; Orel, Handbook, 213.
¹⁶ de Vries, Altnordisches, 412; Bek-Pedersen, Norns, 15–20.
¹⁷ Watkins, American Heritage, 99; Oxford English Dictionary, s.vv. “weird,” “worth,” “become,”
“versus.”
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