The norns were supernatural female entities responsible for the fates of all living beings in Viking Age Scandinavia. Associated with Yggdrasil, the world tree and central element of the nine realms of Norse cosmology, the norns are not active agents in the stories of Odin, Thor, and Loki. Instead, they linger in the shadowy background of the Viking Age imagination as implacable manifestations of what was, what is, and what is inevitably yet to come.

In the mindset of the Norse, the future was preordained and unchangeable. While Viking Age Scandinavians believed in free will, they understood individual choices as steps taken toward a pre-existing and inescapable result. Any individual's fate was not in the hands of the norns. In fact, the Old Norse phrase norna domr ("decision of the norns") was synonymous with misfortune, a common theme in Old Norse literature.

Even the gods themselves were bound to predetermined destinies, yet still made a number of ultimately futile attempts to subvert or avoid them. Frigg tries to save her son Baldr from his fated death by securing promises from all things in the world not to harm him, only to be thwarted by the one thing in the cosmos she overlooked. The Æsir famously attempt to bind Fenrir – the monstrous wolf fated to kill Odin during the battle of Ragnarök – only for his escape to become a harbinger of the end. Even Thor attempts to subvert fate by fishing for the great Midgard serpent Jörmungandr well before their fatal duel, to mention just a few instances of the gods trying to sidestep what will be. In all cases, however, the norns seem to linger just at the edge of the stories, without any appearance of affect or opinion, governing fate.

In a cosmology full of different creatures – elves, dwarves, jötnar, Æsir, Vanir, humans, trolls, and more – norns held power over all of them, but they are not described as gods themselves. In some sources, they are human women, giantesses, or they appear in groups as the descendants of the Æsir, or the elves, or the dwarves, in which case they were called "daughters of Dvalin" (Byock 2005, 26). Regardless of their origins, the norns are always described as being powerful female entities, aligning them in theme, if not in function, to other potent female beings in Norse mythology, including the valkyries and the dísir. In their manifestation as arbiters of fortune, the Prose Edda, compiled in the 13th century by Snorri Sturluson, describes many norns who come to each person at birth to decide how long they will live, but it also mentions that good norns, born of noble lineages, shape good lives while wicked norns fashion the fates of the miserable and unfortunate in life.

Scholars believe that this multiplicity of norns might reflect beliefs more accurate to pre-Christian Norse ideologies than that of a trinity, which might have been influenced by comparison or exposure to classical precedents. While it is hard to trace the history of these female fates, the norns are best known as a group of three, all of whose names relate to the Old Norse verb verða, "to be."

Snorri's Prose Edda identifies Urd (ON: Urðr) as the first of the norns. Her name can be translated as "fate", "destiny", or "became" (urðum in Old Norse) and likely derives from the Urdar brunnr ("Well of Urd"), the name of one of the springs near the roots of Yggdrasil. The Poetic Edda identifies Urdar brunnr as the home of the norns and locates it close to the center of the cosmos. Curiously, this centrality may have inspired Eilífr Goðrúnarson, a late 10th-century poet in the court of Jarl Hákon, to identify this as the home of Christ, further indicating an enduring fascination with this location, even in the midst of Scandinavia's conversion to Christianity.

Besides her association with the well, not much is said about Urd herself. According to the Eddas, she shares her role and responsibilities with Verdandi ("becoming") and Skuld, whose name comes from Old Norse skulu, meaning "become, or intend" but can also be translated as something like "obligation" or "shall-be." Taken together, the names of these female figures are related to past, present, and future, respectively, though Neil Price cautions readers not to assume the cliché of maiden, woman, and crone commonly associated with trios of goddesses. In their place beside the tree, these three norns are described as smearing moist clay from the water's edge onto the trunk of Yggdrasil in an effort to keep the tree healthy, which might have been imagined as an uphill battle, considering many of the denizens of Yggdrasil's ecosystem were constantly gnawing on its branches and roots.

In the heroic poems of Old Norse literature about the lives of human men and women, the norns are mentioned often but in passing, typically when characters lament bad moments in their past or unfortunate things to come. In Reginsmál ("Regin's Lay") in the Poetic Edda, a dwarf named Andvari tells Loki that, "in ancient days a cruel norn shaped our fate, so that I've had to wander the waters" (Orchard 2011, 155). In Fáfnismál ("Fáfnir's Lay"), Sigurd asks a dying dragon to tell him the nature of "the norns, who come to those in need, and deliver mothers of children" (Orchard 2011, 162). In Guðrúnarkviða in forna ("The ancient song of Guðrun"), the protagonist's husband describes the norns waking them in a mood of grim foreboding and mentions a prophecy of his murder at the hands of his wife.

The beginning of the poem Helgakviða Hundingsbana in fyrri ("The earlier song of Helgi, the slayer of Hunding") sets the stage for Helgi's life by indicating that the norns came to Helgi at his birth, promising him a life of fame and glory. Just after Helgi is born, the poem reads:

It was night in the homestead, the norns came, those who would shape fate for that noble; they said he'd become the most famed of war-lords, and be thought the best of princelings. They braided strongly the strands of fate, shook up the stronghold in Brálund; they arranged the golden threads and fixed them in the middle under Moon's hall.

(Orchard 2011, 117)

These threads of fate are also mentioned in Reginsmál, where they are an indication of the power of Sigurd as a nobleman and said to be "spread over all lands" (Orchard 2011, 157). The norns' role in heroic literature as active agents of fate is far more explicit than in the stories of the gods: the humans of the Viking Age seem to have been far more aware of or at least more outspoken about the inevitability of resisting fate than were their gods.

While the norns are undoubtedly shapers of fate, sources differ in describing how or whether there is a physical process associated with forming the lives and destinies of all creatures in their hands. The Poetic Edda describes the norns carving wood in their home under the world tree:

From there come maidens, knowing much, three from the lake that stands under the tree…they carved on wood-tablets…laws they laid down, lives they chose for the children of mankind, the fates of men.

(Orchard 2011, 8)

We can imagine that the norns were likely carving runes on their wooden tablets. Runes were an alphabet that predated the Viking Age and were the primary writing system used in pre-Christian Scandinavia. Many iterations of runic alphabets existed but the most well known are Elder and Younger Futhark, so called because of their relative ages and because the first letters of their runic alphabets correspond to the letters F, U, TH, A, R, and K. This is similar to the convention introduced by the Greek "alpha" and "beta" informing the word "alphabet" and the Roman alphabet being alternately known as the "ABCs." Individual runes were primarily composed of straight lines, making them easier to carve into hard materials like wood, antler, bone, metal, and stone.

Archeologists have found an abundance of runic inscriptions on objects large and small, demonstrating that runes were used for identifying or labeling objects, commemorating achievements or the lives of the deceased, writing messages, and attempting magic. Indeed, runes themselves often had names and were perceived as powerful: Odin famously sacrificed himself to himself and hung from Yggdrasil for nine nights just to acquire them. While Odin had to struggle to have their power in his midst, Sleipnir, the eight-legged steed of Odin and child of Loki by a stallion, had them etched on his teeth, and the norns themselves had runes carved into each fingernail, symbolizing the guarded nature of their powers.

The power of runes and their relationship to portents and prophecy is attested in Atlamál in Grœlenzku ("The Greenlandic Lay of Atli") when a woman is mentioned who "could read the runes, she spelt out word-staves by the firelight" (Orchard 2011, 217). This poem acknowledges that "few folk have the mastery of runes" (Orchard 2011, 217), but it definitely implies that this powerful alphabet was not confined to use by the gods and norns, though the runes in Atlamál are said to be spoiled in some way and difficult to read, resulting in confusion and disbelief about the fates they described.

Some depictions of the norns allude to their manipulation of threads of fate, which might be the origin of the idea of their role as weavers of fate. Considering the extant sources do not explicitly mention them weaving, it would make sense that this was an interpretation likely influenced by later contact with stories of the Fates from Greek mythology, predicated on their role in affecting those threads which shaped men's lives, as described in Helgakviða Hundingsbana in fyrri. In his book Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings, Neil Price points out the poignancy in this metaphor as it pertains to weaving on a loom. In the case of an upright loom, the warp of a textile will include a pattern determined ahead of time by the threading of heddles. While this pattern is inherent to the textile from the beginning of the weaving process, it is not discernible until the cloth is nearly complete. In the Viking Age imagination, this would have represented an apt metaphor for the inevitability of fate: the weaver might make decisions in the crafting process, but nothing she does will change the pattern in the product.

Whether they were carving wood or weaving thread, the norns and the fate they embodied were at the core of the fatalistic Viking mindset. In this context, we can understand how prophecy and knowledge were so powerful and so tragic in the stories and beliefs of the Viking Age. Then, as now, humans were in a constant struggle to understand why things happened the way they did, to make sense of the present, and to anticipate what the next day would bring. The fact that the Viking Age imagination included their gods in this struggle reaffirms their convictions about fate and fortune.

This, in turn, offers context for Viking prophecy: the Poem Völuspá of the Poetic Edda features a seeress, with a disconcerting edge to her speech, who recites visions of the past and future of the whole cosmos. The seeress in this poem, like the trio of norns, stretches the idea of fate over history and prophecy, flowing from glimpses of one into the other and making the future seem almost like the past in its dream-like surety. But the norns never speak the way that the seeress does in that poem. Instead, we glean what we know about them from others who speak to their impact on the living. At the end of Hamdismál in forma ("The ancient lay of Hamdir") in the Poetic Edda, the narrator sums up the finality of the norns as arbiters of fate: "‘Great glory we have gained though we die now or tomorrow; no man survives a single dusk beyond the norns' decree" (Orchard 2011, 238).