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Chapter 2. Connections 45
In early Germanic culture, wise men sought to interact with powerful and noble
lineages which would provide them and theirs with luck and power. Only fools such
as the unfortunate but greedy family of Hreidmar in the Saga of the Rheingold would
blindly align themselves with a lineage without knowledge of its ørlög. Therefore,
the long recitations of lineages of pre-industrial, pre-Christian cultures such as are
seen in the well-known “begats” of the Old Testament were never meant to be merely
a formality but were of absolute necessity.
Tacitus in Germania spoke of the importance of omens and divination to the
Germanic peoples of 2000 years ago. In the 20th century, we often think of divination
as being either a parlor game or a serious way of glimpsing the future. But to
the Germanic forebears, divination was a way to gain knowledge of the past and
its effects on the present. Mark Twain in Life on the Mississippi describes very
clearly how important it is for the captain of a paddle-wheel steamboat to know
the conditions of the waters, both on the surface and underneath, for the sake
and safety of the boat and passengers. Measuring the depth of the waters, or
“sounding,” was used in close conjunction with visual inspection of the surface to
make determinations on passabilty. The exact same reasoning was used for the
existence of divination among the northern people: testing or “sounding” the past
with all its connections between events and inspecting the present to determine
the proper course of action to be taken. Divination, then, had little or nothing
to do with the future and certainly nothing to do with “predicting” events which
had not yet come into being. It had only to do with gaining the wisdom of ørlög,
those conditions which made up the present, so that the seekers of knowledge could
advantageously place themselves within the flow of power.
The early Teutons have often been called a fatalistic group of people who believed
that man’s destiny (future) was rewritten at birth. Snorri tells of this setting of
“destiny”:
“There stands one beautiful hall under the ash by the 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. There are also other norns
who visit everyone when they are born to shape their lives, and these are
of divine origin, though others are of the race of elves, and a third group
are of the race of dwarfs, as it says here: ‘Of very diverse parentage I think
the norns are, they do not have a common ancestry. Some are descended
from Æsir, some are descended from elves, some are the daughters of Dvalin.’
Then spoke Gangleri: ’If norns determine the fates of men, they allot terribly
unfairly, when some have a good and prosperous life, and some have little
success or glory, some a long life, some short.’ High said: ’Good norns, ones