TEUTONIC MYTHOLOGY. - Centrostudirpinia.it

410 WISE WOMEN.
The Edda expressly teaches that there are good and lad norns
(goftar ok illar, grimmar, liotar), and though it names only three,
that there are more of them : some are descended from gods, others
from elves, others from dwarfs, Sn. 18. 19. Seem. 187-8. Why
should the norns be furnished with dogs ? grey norna, Seem. 273 a .
We see, throughout this Eddie description, things and persons
are kept clearly apart. Destiny itself is called orlog, or else nau&r
(necessitas), aldr (aevum) ; the norns have to manage it, espy it,
decree it, pronounce it (see Suppl.). And the other dialects too had
possessed the same term : OHG. urlac, AS. orlceg, MHG. urlouc
(Gramm. 2, 7. 87. 789. 790), OS. orlag, orlcgi, aldarlagu (Hel. 103,
1
8. 113, 11. 125, 15) it was j
only when the heathen goddesses
had been cast off, that the meanings of the words came to be con
founded, and the old flesh-and-blood wurt, ivurff, wyrd to pale into
a mere impersonal urlac.
In the same relation as norn to orlog, stands parca to fatum
(from fari, like^qviftr from qveSa qvaft, quoth), and also alaa, fjiolpa
to avdyfCTj (nauSr) or etfiapfievrj. But when once the parcae had
vanished from the people s imagination, the Eomance language (by
a process the reverse of that just noticed amongst us) formed out
of the abstract noun a new and personal one, out sifatum an Ital.
fata, Span, hada, Prov. 2
fada (Eayn. sub v.), Fr. fee. I do not know
if this was prompted by a faint remembrance of some female beings
in the Celtic faith, or the influence of the Germanic norns. But
these fays, so called at first from their announcing destiny, soon
came to be ghostly wives in general, altogether the same as our
idisi and volur. 3 How very early the name was current in Italy,
is proved by Ausonius, who in his Gryphus ternarii numeri brings
forward the tres Charites, trio- Fata, and by Procopius, who
1 From legan (to lay down, constituere), like the AS. lage, ON. log (lex) ;
therefore urlac, fundamental law. The forms urlouc, urliuge have significantly
been twisted round to the root liugan, louc (celare).
2 Conf. nata, nee ; amata, aimee ; lata, lee. Some MHG. poets say few
(Hartm. Woli r.), smefeie, Haupt s zeitschr. 2, 182-3, others /ane (Gotfr. Conr.).
3 OFr. poems call them, in addition to fees, divesses (Marie de Fr. 2, 385),
duesses (Meon 4, 158. 165), duesse and fee (Wolf, lais 51) ; puceles bien curves
; sapaudes (wise-women, from
(Meon 3, 418), /ranches puceles senees (3, 419)
sapere ?), Marie de Fr. 2, 385. Enchanting beauty
is ascribed to them all :
plus bela que fada, Ferabras 2767 ; cont . 16434. A book of H. Schreiber
(Die leen in Europa, Freib. 1842) throws much light on the antiquities of fayworship.
Houses, castles and hills of the fays remind us of the wise-women s
towers, of the Venus-hill and Holla-hill, and of giant s houses. In Irish,
siubrog, siyhbrog, is first a fays house, then the fay community.