Meditations on NOD: The Weaving of the Norns

This essay was a long time in coming. Parts of it were written over a year ago. It was finally completed on the Winter Solstice of 2021. NOD is very personal to me. In fact, it is one of the two runes that I consider my personal runes. It is the rune that I call on in times of need. It may be said to have shaped my destiny and resulted in this essay as well each step of this journey that I tread. 

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I begin my meditations on the eighth rune, NOD by considering Hávamál verse 153. Here Odin reveals how he uses this rune to settle all strife.

"An eighth one is mine, quite useful to hear
For all the people in danger and need.
Where hate should arise from man against man
This I settle fast!”[1]

Many translations use the word “needful” where Welz has utilized the word, “useful.” For the eighth rune, the term “needful” may indeed be a more appropriate choice. The very name of this rune means, “need.” Guido von List provides an important clarification of the meaning of the “need” rune. He writes:

“This is not ‘need’ [distress] in the modern sense of the word, but rather the ‘compulsion of fate’ –that the Norns fix according to primal laws. With this, the organic causality of all phenomena is to be understood.”[2]

Von List goes on to explain how knowledge of the “need” rune may be used:

“Whoever is able to grasp the primal cause of a phenomenon, and whoever gains knowledge of organically lawful evolution and the phenomena arising from it, is also able to judge their consequences just as they are beginning to ferment. Therefore, he commands knowledge of the future and also understands how to settle all strife through ‘the constraint of the clearly recognized way of fate.’”[3]

It is critical to grasp Von List’s point that “need” should be defined as “compulsion of fate.” With that in mind, turning to the Old English Rune Poem (OERP), a similar idea is revealed:

“Need is hard on the heart, yet for men’s sons
it often becomes / a help and healing
if they heed it before.”[4]

Therefore, the OERP warns that fate can be hard, but it can also be helpful if one pays attention to its warnings. The Norwegian Rune Poem (NRP) even more fatalistically reads, “Need makes for little choice.”[5] Von List’s “motto” for NOD continues this theme and demonstrates his solid understanding of wyrd, “Use your fate, do not strive against it.”[6]

From the perspective of Germanic spirituality, NOD has long been associated with the Norns. Much of our knowledge of the Norns comes from the Eddas. Snorri Sturluson describes them in Gylfaginning (“The Tricking of Gylfi”) as follows:

“There stands there one beautiful hall under the ash (Yggdrasil) by the well (Wyrd’s Well), and out of this hall come three maidens whose names are Weird, Verdandi, Skuld. These maidens shape men’s lives. We call them norns.”[7]

In Old Norse the names of the three most frequently mentioned Norns[8] are Urðr, Verðandi, and Skuld. The common explanation of these names are “past,” “present,” and “future.”[9] A translation that better conveys the Old Norse meaning however is “that which is,” “that which is becoming” and “that which should be.”[10] Several authors have also indicated that Skuld is etymologically associated with the modern German word, “Schuld” meaning “debt.”[11] While the Norns do not “decide” the fate of men in a deterministic way, they do “mark” such fate. The Vǫluspá (“The Prophecy of the Seeress”) makes this reference to the Norns:

“Thence wise maidens three betake them
under spreading boughs their bower stands
[Urth one is hight, the other, Verthandi,
Skuld the third: they scores did cut,]
They laws did make, they lives did choose:
For the children of men they marked their fates.”[12]

The future is not unchangeable but rather what “should be.” It is based on the actions that occurred in the past and are occurring in the present. The future may then accurately be described as a “debt” to be paid based on the actions of the past and present. This helps to explain why with NOD we don’t attempt to confront destiny, but rather to use it.

The association of NOD with the Norns has long been made. In addition to Von List’s comments, Siegfried Kummer calls NOD, “the rune of the Norns, who spin the thread of fate from past to present and future.[13] Rudolf John Gorsleben echoes Von List, “Here we do not understand NOD (misery) in today’s meaning, but as necessity, coercion of destiny, which the Norns determine following the Ur-law that is active within every creature.”[14] Karl Welz goes even further and emphasizes the magical power of the rune to evoke the Norns,

“In the mythology of the North, NOD is one of the Runes of the Norns. The Norns are goddesses who are spinning the threads of destiny, or karma. Therefore to be capable of working with NOD means to be capable of evoking the Norns.”[15]

Considering the Futhorkh sequentially, NOD transitions us from HAGAL (Yggdrasil) to the Norns. Such a transition is very smooth and natural based on our knowledge of the Norns from the Eddas. Snorri writes:

“It is also said that the norns that dwell by Weird’s well take water from the well each day and with it the mud that lies round the well and pour it up over the ash so that its branches may not rot or decay. And this water is so holy that all things that come into that well go as white as the membrane called the skin that lies round the inside of an eggshell.”[16]

In HAGAL, we become our “All.” HAGAL is however a starting point and the first of the second aett that I associate with the concept of “being.” With NOD we begin to understand that we are bigger than ourselves –we are part of a web that begins in a primal time and extends to an infinity of possibilities that we call “future.” NOD enables us to expand our consciousness to recognize who we were, who we are, and even who we will be. We feel the need (“compulsion of fate”) and begin to understand both fate and karma. We understand that the weaving of wyrd began before we were born –in Urðr's well “under the ash.” We shape our present lives and our future lives by caring for Yggdrasil, that cosmic body inside us –the life that we have made for ourselves.

If we relate NOD, the second rune of the second aett back to the second rune of the first aett UR, we find that both are “healing” runes. The OERP refers to NOD and its qualities of “help and healing.” While UR emphasizes personal healing as commonly understood, NOD extends such healing to past and future lives. In his "Song of NOD," Karl Hans Welz describes how one may utilize NOD to dissolve “karmic debts.”

“More and more I am aware of my karmic debts in my lives, and what these debts signify. I am looking forward to settle all my accounts so that I can progress unencumbered by old karmic debts. I can settle these accounts not the way my old ego did who was helplessly exposed to blind fate and time, but I am settling these accounts as a new person who is working knowingly in the network of karma and time, which I am understanding better with every new day.”[17]

NOD’s healing is necessary before we move onto the ninth rune IS. Much as the personal healing of UR is needed before working with the energies of THORN, NOD’s healing of karmic debt is required before working with the energies of IS which further connects us with the world of the gods. NOD also teaches us that it is useless to fight our destiny. Welz writes, “Instead of fighting karma, I am able to consciously live it, and, with the Rune of the Norn, to responsibly shape it.”[18]

Through NOD we can settle external and internal strife quickly. We become aware of primal causality and the consequences resulting from it. Through such awareness, we don’t fear or complain about the past, present or future. Rather we shape our destiny through our good acts. It is by this method that we refrain from fighting karma and begin to respect it and make our marks on the tree of life.

Notes:

1. Karl Hans Welz, Letter of Instructions # 8: The Rune NOD. https://runemagick.com/rune_magic08.html 

2. Guido von List, The Secret of the Runes, trans. Stephen Flowers (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1988), 54-55. 

3. Von List, 55. 

4. Stephen Pollington, Rudiments of Runelore (Cambridgeshire, UK: Anglo-Saxon Books, 2011) 47. 

5. Pollington,53. 

6. Von List, 55. 

7. Snorri Sturluson, Edda, trans., Anthony Faulkes (North Clarendon, VT: Everyman, 1995), 18. 

8. Snorri mentions other norns “who visit everyone when they are born to shape their lives.” See Edda, p. 18. 

9. This definition is provided for example in Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology, trans. Angela Hall, (Rochester: D.S. Brewer, 2007) 237. 

10. Kveldulf Gundarsson, Teutonic Magic: The Magical and Spiritual Practices of the Germanic Peoples (St. Paul: Llewellyn Publications, 1994), 293. 

11. Rudolf John Gorsleben, Hochzeit der Menschheit, trans., Karl Hans Welz. English language translation 2002 of the German language edition of 1930, 175. https://runemagick.com/gorsleben.pdf 

12. Lee M. Hollander, trans., The Poetic Edda (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012) 4. 

13. Siegfried Adolf Kummer, Holy Rune Might, trans. Aelfric Avery (Vavenby, CA: Woodharrow Bund Press, 2019), 64. 

14. Gorsleben, 449. 

15. Welz. 

16. Sturluson, 19. 

17. Welz. 

18. Welz.