wyrd
Sign in to saveAlso known as weird, Ørlǫg
thumb|Poster for the Norwegian magazine Urd (magazine)|Urd by [[Andreas Bloch and Olaf Krohn|upright]] Wyrd is a concept in Anglo-Saxon culture roughly corresponding to fate or personal destiny. The word is ancestral to Modern English weird, whose meaning has drifted towards an adjectival use with a more general sense of "supernatural" or "uncanny", or simply "unexpected".
~6 min read
Encyclopedic overview
5 sectionsContents
- Etymology
- Fate in Germanic mythology
- Other uses
- See also
- References
thumb|Poster for the Norwegian magazine Urd (magazine)|Urd by [[Andreas Bloch and Olaf Krohn|upright]] Wyrd is a concept in Anglo-Saxon culture roughly corresponding to fate or personal destiny. The word is ancestral to Modern English weird, whose meaning has drifted towards an adjectival use with a more general sense of "supernatural" or "uncanny", or simply "unexpected".
The cognate term to wyrd in Old Norse is , with a similar meaning, but also personified as a deity: Urðr (anglicized as ), one of the Norns in Norse mythology. The word also appears in the name of the well where the Norns meet, Urðarbrunnr.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “wyrd” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.