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They love and withhold their helping, they hate and refrain the blow;
They curse and they may not sunder, they bless and they shall not blend;
They have fashioned the good and the evil, they abide the change and the end.”
Sigurd the Volsung (William Morris).
Story of Nornagesta.
On one occasion the Norns wandered off to Denmark, and entered the dwelling of a nobleman just as his first child came into the world. Entering the apartment where the mother lay, the first Norn promised that the child should be handsome and brave, and the second that he should be prosperous and a great scald—predictions which filled the parents’ hearts with joy and greatly surprised the neighbors, who, crowding in to see the strangers, rudely pushed the third Norn off her chair.
Angry at this insult, Skuld proudly rose and declared her sisters’ gifts would be of no avail, as she decreed that the child should live only as long as the taper then burning near the bedside. These ominous words filled the mother’s heart with terror, and she tremblingly clasped her babe closer to her breast, for the taper was nearly burned out and its extinction could not be very far off. The eldest Norn, however, had no intention of seeing her prediction thus set at naught; but as she could not force her sister to retract her words, she quickly seized the taper, put out the light, and giving the smoking stump to the child’s mother, bade her carefully treasure it, and never light it again until her son was weary of life.
“In the mansion it was night:
The Norns came,