The heroic literature begins with a hard premise: much of what happens to you is not yours to decide. And a fierce conclusion from it — that the manner of the meeting is.
Before anything else, what these twelve essays are working from, because it governs every claim in them.
The Norse and Germanic heroic material reaches us almost entirely through texts written down in Christian societies, centuries after the pagan world they depict. The Poetic Edda survives in a thirteenth-century Icelandic manuscript. Snorri Sturluson, who gave us the most systematic account of Norse myth, was a thirteenth-century Christian chieftain writing a handbook for poets, and scholars have argued for two hundred years about how much order he imposed on material that may not have had it. The sagas were composed two or three centuries after the events they narrate.
So this is literature about a past, not a record of a faith. When I say “the heroes believed,” I mean the texts portray them as believing, which is a considerably smaller claim.
What those texts portray is a world in which fate is set and the reckoning is coming, and in which the only thing at issue is the manner of the meeting.
Wyrd is the word usually reached for here, and it is Old English rather than Old Norse — the Norse term is urðr. They are cognate and they are not the same word in the same literature, and the modern habit of using wyrd for the whole northern world is a blurring worth not repeating.
The familiar picture — three Norns at the roots of the world-tree, spinning the threads of every life — is also less securely attested than its popularity suggests, and some of the weaving imagery may owe as much to the classical Fates as to anything native.
What survives the caution is the working idea, which appears throughout the literature without needing the machinery: the outcome is not up for negotiation, the day is set, and a person’s whole scope is how they stand when it arrives.
There is a body of work on what happens physiologically when a person faces a demanding, uncertain situation. The challenge-and-threat framework distinguishes two patterns: one in which a person appraises themselves as having the resources to meet what is coming, and one in which they do not, with measurably different cardiovascular signatures.4
The framework has reasonable support and the usual caveats: the physiological markers are noisy, the appraisal measures are self-report, and the effect on actual performance is more modest than the framework’s popular versions imply.
What it gives me is not proof of anything the sagas say. It is a vocabulary for something the literature is already describing: that two people can face the same unmovable thing and be doing something different with it, and that the difference is partly in how the demand and the resources are being sized.
The forward stance is excellent advice for a person facing a hard thing they have chosen, and it can be cruel advice for a person facing a hard thing that has been done to them.
“Meet it head-on” said to someone in poverty, or illness, or a situation someone else is maintaining, quietly relocates a structural problem into their posture. The heroic literature is not much help here, because it was composed by and about people with standing — chieftains, landholders, warriors — in a society that also contained thralls, who appear in the sagas mostly as property and whose manner of meeting their fate nobody recorded.
There is also a specific failure mode: the forward stance used to refuse a real assessment. Squaring up to something you should be walking away from is not courage, and the literature, which is full of men who died in avoidable feuds over insults, is better evidence for this than against it.
What I keep is narrow. Where something genuinely cannot be changed and is genuinely coming, there is a difference between meeting it and bracing against it, and the difference is partly yours.
Note — whose fate was recorded
The same society held thralls, who appear mostly as property and whose manner of meeting their fate nobody wrote down. “Meet it head-on” said to someone whose situation is being maintained by somebody else relocates a structural problem into their posture.
The stance is built on an honest inventory rather than on bravado, which is the part the popular version drops.
These essays draw on Old Norse and Old English literature — the Poetic Edda, Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, the Icelandic sagas, and Beowulf — all of which were written down in Christian societies long after the pagan world they describe. Eddic and saga passages follow the translations named below; where a term or picture is contested, the essay says so rather than the list. Modern research is cited by author and publication.
The literature’s premise is that the reckoning is coming and the outcome is not up for negotiation — and that the manner of the meeting is the one thing left.
That is a good stance toward a chosen hard thing and a cruel one offered to someone whose situation is being maintained by somebody else. And it was recorded by people with standing, about people with standing.