Tolerable Liberties Taken by Richard Wagner With the Women of Fate
The paper will attempt to defend several of Richard Wagner’s choices in Der Ring des Nibelungen as to his treatment of the Norns and their mother Erda, “the eternal world’s first ancestress.”
She and her daughters—Urda, Verdandi, and Skuld—who abide in their dwelling place by the Well of Wyrd—decide the destinies of all human beings. The daughters are past, present, and future: Urda “that which has become,” Verdandi “that which is becoming,” and Skuld “that which should become.” According to Völuspà, the Prophecy of the Seeress, “the much-knowing maidens carved in wood” as “they laid down the law [and] chose lives/for the children of men/people’s fates.”
“Carved in wood” must mean more than runes on staves. The word used for “wood” in Völuspà also means “plank,” as found in one’s domicile and upon which events in one’s life were customarily recorded. “Carved in wood” connotes permanence—cast in concrete, we might say.
In The Ring, Wagner has the three Norns weaving fate into ropes made up of the strands of destiny of all the living. For each life, there is a gold thread intertwined with others to make up society. Skuld sees woven into the rope the downfall of the gods, prophesied by her mother, Erda, in a warning to Wotan: “All that is shall come to an end.”
Wagner’s choices in the Ring, with Erda in particular, help light the way along the dark roads first set down in Norse saga and medieval epic.
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