wyrd

Old English wyrd meant fate, destiny, personal fortune — from the verb weorþan, to become, to happen. Wyrd was what becomes of you: not a plan imposed from above but the unfolding of events that constitute your life. The word is cognate with Old Norse urðr, the name of one of the three Norns who sat beneath Yggdrasil and wove the fates of gods and mortals. Urðr tended the well of fate. Wyrd was what she wove.

In Anglo-Saxon literature, wyrd is inescapable but not predestined in a simple sense. The Beowulf poet writes 'Wyrd oft nereð unfǣgne eorl' — fate often spares the undoomed warrior. Wyrd operates, but human courage and action matter within its framework. This is not Greek fatalism or Calvinist predestination; it is something more fluid, a current that can be navigated but not escaped. The Anglo-Saxons respected wyrd without surrendering to it.

Shakespeare changed the word's trajectory permanently. The 'weird sisters' in Macbeth (first performed around 1606) are the three witches who prophesy Macbeth's rise and fall. Shakespeare drew on Holinshed's Chronicles, which called them 'weird sisters' using the old sense of wyrd — fate-speakers, destiny-weavers. But audiences who did not know the Old English word heard 'weird' and associated it with the witches' uncanny, supernatural strangeness. The Fates became the freaks.

By the 19th century, weird meant strange, uncanny, eerie — and by the 20th, it had further diluted to merely odd or unusual. 'That's weird' is now a throwaway observation about anything mildly unexpected. The word that once named the force governing all existence has become a casual adjective for a funny-looking hat. Fate became strangeness. Destiny became a shrug.