What does "Wyrd" mean?
The Old English word “wyrd” is often celebrated by English Literature nerds and is a very specific word with a very specific meaning roughly translated to “fate”. It is more useful to understand it in terms of stories: It is used for example in the Old English Elegy The Wanderer, when the narrator says, “Wyrd bið ful aræd” (The Wanderer, line 5b) roughly translates to “Wyrd (Fate) is fully unescapable”.
The narrative laments the loss of his lord, comrades, and his lord’s mead-hall and is living in exile in the story on a boat on the cold ocean. His world has lost all structure and he is literally and figuratively adrift at sea, but thinks of the events leading to the destruction in in a stoic manner, showing strength in the sense that the loss was the fulfillment of destiny.
Its easiest direct translation is “fate”, however it’s also related to a Proto-Germanic and Indo-European root word meaning “to turn”, as well as related words like the Old English verb weorþan (“to grow into, become”). It is often personified in the figure of The Fates in literature, similar to how the Greeks personified various concepts into images and people as we discussed with Apollo and Dionysus.
Wyrd can mean “that which comes to pass”, in the sense that as in many Greek tragedies, for the Anglo-Saxons wyrd was often inescapable and connoted a sense of a forward moving force that shaped the outcomes of stories. The characters in Anglo-Saxon writings often grew into their own wyrds and the stories explain how they come into being. Wyrd is tied to the concept of “becoming” because the characters grow and change throughout the stories,
The word Wyrd can also carry a sense of Impending doom or disaster in Old English writings because of the nature of the stories. There can also be a sense of resignation towards one’s fate, but also courage in the face of danger.
The word “wyrd” is the origin of the modern term “weird”, which gives a more general sense of “uncanny” or “supernatural”, and is more a term to describe something or someone. The word “wyrd”, however, describes a process, which is what I wanted to contrast with our modern way of thinking.
While the modern concept of “weird” may categorize something or someone as “other”, or attempt to describe or give it an attribute, the word wyrd is a process that takes into account past histories of individuals that shape their future possibilities and choices. For the Anglo-Saxons, wyrd was a cultural concept that they comported themselves with or thought with and shaped their way of thinking. Has our understanding of the word “wyrd” been obscured by modern usage, by semantic drift, by a forgetting of old legends, or by our scientific and classifactory way of understanding the world?
The last point may be a leap, but I want to emphasize, that I believe modern culture focuses too much on “what” things are, rather than the “way” they are, or the way people do things and how that shapes them as individuals. Or rather, is it easy nowadays to forget the ways things come to be and try to focus on the nature of things, and the nature of a woman or man?
Can we focus more on becoming, and less on the spectacle of images that life throws before us? Life is a stage, but it matters less what the scene is and more what the story is and how it brings the play to life.
