The norns watch over man through life. They spin his thread of fate at his birth and mark out with it the limits of his sphere of action in life. Their decrees are inviolable destiny, their dispensations inevitable necessity. The gods themselves must bow before the laws of the norns; they are limited by time; they are born and must die. Urd and Verdande, the Past and Present, are represented as stretching a web from east to west, from the radiant dawn of life to the glowing sunset, and Skuld, the Future, tears it to pieces. There is a deeply-laid plan in the universe, a close union between spirit and matter. There is no such thing as independent life or action. The ends of the threads wherewith our life is woven lie deeply hid in the abyss of the beginning. Self-consciousness is merely an abstraction. The self-conscious individual is merely a leaf, which imagines itself to be something, but is in fact only a bud that enfolds itself and falls off from the tree of the universe. The self-contradiction between absolute necessity and free will was an unsolved riddle with our heathen ancestors, and puzzles the minds of many of our most profound thinkers still. Thus, says the Elder Edda, the norns came to decide the destiny of Helge Hundingsbane: It was in times of yore, When the eagles screamed, Holy waters fell From the heavenly hills; Then to Helge, The great of soul, Berghild gave birth In Braalund. In the mansion it was night: The norns came, Who should the prince’s Life determine; They him decreed A prince most famed to be, And of leaders Accounted best. With all their might they span The fatal threads, When that he burghs should overthrow In Braalund. They stretched out The golden cord, And beneath the middle Of the moon’s mansion fixed it. East and west They hid the ends, Where the prince had Lands between; Toward the north Nere’s sister Cast a chain, Which she bade last forever. Nay, in the Norseman’s faith, man and all things about him were sustained by divine power. The norns decreed by rigid fate each man’s career, which not even the gods could alter. Man was free to act, but all the consequences of his actions were settled beforehand. Footnote 34: Wagner, p. 192. PART II. THE LIFE AND EXPLOITS OF THE GODS. VERDANDE.