The three weird women in Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Macbeth represent a later conception of the three Norns, now degraded to mere witches.
Compare the Norns with the Fates of the Greek Mythology. These, also, are three in number. They sit clothed in white, and garlanded, singing of destiny. Clotho, the Past, spins; Lachesis, the Present, divides; and Atropos, the Future, stands ready with her shears to cut the thread.
[EN#7]—The Idea of Fatality.
Throughout the story of the Nibelungs and Volsungs, of Sigurd and of Siegfried,—whether we follow the older versions or the mote recent renderings,—there is, as it were, an ever-present but indefinable shadow of coming fate, “a low, inarticulate voice of Doom,” foretelling the inevitable. This is but in consonance with the general ideas of our Northern ancestors regarding the fatality which shapes and controls every man’s life. These ideas are embodied in more than one ancient legend. We find them in the old Anglo-Saxon poem of Beowulf. “To us,” cries Beowulf in his last fight, “to us it shall be as our Weird betides,—that Weird that is every man’s lord!” “Each man of us shall abide the end of his life-work; let him that may work, work his doomed deeds ere death comes!” Similar ideas prevailed among the Greeks. Read, for example, that passage in the Iliad describing the parting of Hector and Andromache, and notice the deeper meaning of Hector’s words.
[EN#8]—Regin.
As we have already observed (EN#1), the older versions of this myth called Siegfried’s master and teacher Regin, while the more recent versions call him Mimer. We have here endeavored to harmonize the two versions by representing Mimer as being merely Regin in disguise.
[EN#9]—Gripir.
“A man of few words was Gripir; but he knew of all deeds that had been; And times there came upon him, when the deeds to be were seen: No sword had he held in his hand since his father fell to field, And against the life of the slayer he bore undinted shield: Yet no fear in his heart abided, nor desired he aught at all: But he noted the deeds that had been, and looked for what should befall.” Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung, Bk. II.
[EN#10]—The Hoard.
This story is found in both the Elder and the Younger Eddas, and is really the basis upon which the entire plot of the legend of Sigurd, or Siegfried, is constructed. See also EN#18.