The Wyrd Sisters

Description

Originally, Weird meant “destiny.” It was the name of the eldest Fate: English Wyrd, Norse Urth, German Wurt. Medieval sources describe her as weaving fate, knotting, causing, arousing, ordaining, dissolving, and transforming.

An Anglo-Saxon proverb circa 900 CE declares that “Wyrd is mightiest.” (Wyrd by∂ swi∂ost.)
Her craft encompassed foreknowledge, prophecy and all the shamanic arts. The British sometimes called witches weird-woman or weird-wife. Old references to weirding peas hark back to the casting of lots. The Scots spoke of something magical and uncanny as being weirdfu’.

Medieval Christian texts sometimes continued to use Wyrd or Werd as a name for divine Providence. The “witches” in MacBeth were modeled on accounts of the Thre Wyrd Systeries from the Wyntoun Chronicles and closer to Shakespeare’s time, Holingshed. They still had the powers of goddesses but were shadowed by the demonization of the witch hunts then raging in Europe.