 Welcome to the Endless Knot. Today, we're going to get weird. The word weird comes from Old English weird, meaning fate, and goes back to a Proto-Indo-European root meaning turn. Think of the phrase turn out, and you'll see the connection between turning and fate. It's related to another Old English word, wearathon, which means to become, as well as German werden, which is sometimes used to construct the future tense in German, in Ich werde kommen, I will come, and occasionally the Old English wearathon is used with something of the sense of the future of the verb to be. Weird is also related to the word to ward, and its Old English equivalent, to ward, which could mean future. Of course, the Proto-Indo-European root where gives us many other words in modern English, many through Latin verterrat to turn, such as avert, literally turn away, pervert, literally very turned, and version. Weird was an important concept and much has been written about fatalism in Germanic culture. It used to be argued that weird represented a personified fate goddess in pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon belief, though more recent scholarship is doubtful about this. What's clear is that the Old Norse cognate of Old English weird, Urther, is one of the Norns, along with Verthandi, and Skuld, the Norse fates who determine the course of an individual's destiny. Urther and Verthandi both come from that turning root, the first in the past tense, the second in the present, whereas Skuld comes from the same root that gives us shall and should in English, and thus the three have traditionally been associated with past, present, and future respectively. The Norns hang around Urther Brunner, Urther as well, at the foot of Yggdrasil, the world ash tree that lies at the heart of Norse cosmology, and could bring both fortune and misfortune. And the overall arc of the Norse mythological story ends in the destruction of the gods at Ragnarok, the fate of the gods. And this is but one example of the fatalism often found in Germanic heroic literature, the glory of fighting a losing battle. Better known today perhaps are the Greek equivalents, the Moirai or fates, generally depicted as three women, sometimes named Clotho, Lakesis, and Atropos, meaning spinner, allotter, and unturnable, who determine the destiny of both mortals and gods. As their names imply, they were often seen as woolworking women, spinning the thread of a man's life, measuring his lot, and implacably ending it. Note that turning turns up at both the beginning and end of their job. It's no coincidence, of course, that there are three of them, like the three principal Norns. Three is a significant number in many mythologies, and particularly so for women. There are many sets of three women in Greek mythology, like the graces, the graii, the gorgons, and the nymphs of the Hesperides. The fates have a complicated relationship with the gods in Greek myth. Sometimes even Zeus is bound by their decrees, but sometimes he is warned by their prophecies and is able to avoid his potential fate. And that grouping of three prophetic women is now probably most famous from the weird sisters in William Shakespeare's Macbeth. They appear to Macbeth and Banguo with the famous lines, I'll help thou shalt be king hereafter. And to Banguo, lesser than Macbeth and greater, not so happy yet much happier, thou shalt get king though thou be none. Macbeth, his ambitions aroused, then goes about making this come true by murdering King Duncan and taking the throne for himself. And though we often refer to these three mystical figures as the three witches, they're never called that in the play. In both Shakespeare's text and his source, Hollinshead's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, they are referred to as the weird sisters, that is to say the fates sisters, since they tell Macbeth his fate and in a way determine it through their self-fulfilling prophecy. In Shakespeare's time, the word weird had mostly disappeared from the English language, but it had been preserved in the Scots dialect of English. A 16th century Scottish translation of Virgil's Aeneid renders Parkae the Roman fates as weird sisters. Shakespeare used this unfamiliar term because his source, Hollinshead did, and he was certainly not one to pass up an unusual word. But the word was evidently a difficult one for Shakespeare's readers, as the early and authoritative first folio version of his plays prints it as wayward or wayered. Of course, in more recent times, the phrase weird sisters has become much more well known, especially in fantasy fiction like Terry Pratchett's Weird Sisters series of books or the fictional band called the Weird Sisters in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter. There's an interesting parallel to Macbeth's Weird Sisters in Saxo Grammaticus' Gesta D'Norum, in which he tells a version of the Norse story of Balder and Hother. Unlike the more well-known version of this myth told in the prose Eta, Hother kills Balder not accidentally, but because they are both in competition for the love of the same woman, Nana, who loves Hother but with whom Balder has also fallen in love after catching sight of her bathing. In Saxo's version of the story, Balder is not a Norse god but a demigod, and Hother is a human hero who is helped by forest maidens who magically appear to him in a striking parallel to the Weird Sisters of Macbeth, and they may be the figures shown on the 8th century Frank's casket, which depicts several mythological stories from various different traditions, both Christian and Pagan. While we're on the topic of Shakespeare's plays, one of the conventions he uses to distinguish upper and lower class characters is to have the upper class characters, like Macbeth, speak in verse, as if they're speaking poetry, whereas the lower class characters, like the porter who guards King Duncan's tent, speak in prose. Surprisingly, both these words, verse and prose, come from the same turning route as Weird, as Latin versus meaning turned, and proversus meaning literally turned forward, or in other words straightforward speech. The metaphor behind verse is that the lines of poetry are like a plowed field, with lines that have to turn around at the end, like the rows in the field. And speaking of dramatic conventions in Shakespeare, the Bard and his contemporary playwrights drew on two distinct traditions of tragedy. The older descends from ancient Greek tragedy, like Oedipus the King, formalized by the Greek philosopher Aristotle in his book, The Poetics. This focuses on the character of the tragic hero, and his tragic error, or hamartia, which brings about the tragic outcome and arouses feelings of pity and fear in order to bring about catharsis. In this form of tragedy, the individuals can control their fate and prevent their tragic outcome, but they don't, and thus bring tragedy on themselves. The other model for tragedy descends from the Roman world, and is most indebted to the Roman philosopher Boethius in his book, The Consolation of Philosophy, in which we find the figure of Lady Fortune who blindly turns her wheel of fortune, raising some people up from misfortune to fortune, and casting others down to misfortune. The emphasis here is on fate, which is completely beyond the control of the individual who is, to borrow a line from another Shakespearean play, Fortune's Fool. Shakespeare, being the clever fellow he was, sometimes borrowed elements from both tragic traditions. Macbeth is given a prophecy, but he makes it happen himself because of his own ambition by killing King Duncan to seize the throne. Is he controlled by the self-fulfilling prophecy of the fates, the weird sisters, or is it his tragic error? But if weird originally meant fate, how did it come to have its modern sense of strange, odd, or unusual? Well, it comes down to the fact that the word was so unfamiliar when Shakespeare used it. Basically, although the word traces its ancestry back to the oldest stock of English words in the language of the Anglo-Saxons, few people knew what it meant in the time of Shakespeare and shortly thereafter. And since the weird sisters were shown acting a lot like the early modern stereotype of witches, double-double, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble. The Elizabethan period was way more fascinated by witches and obsessed with witch hunts than the medieval period that Macbeth was actually set in, by the way. People assumed that the sense of the word had something to do with witches. So, supernatural and strange. And it seems to be another of English literature's most famous poets, Percy Bish Shelley, who first popularized this new sense of the word more familiar to us today. The phrase weird fiction was then used to describe the supernatural literature of Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. And today, the word has taken on an almost slangy sense of simply unexpected or different. It's now everywhere from film titles like Weird Science to the unofficial slogan of Austin, Texas, keep Austin weird. In popular music, it appears in the name Weird Al Yankovic and in the lyrics of Professor Elemental's song All In Together. There's no such thing as normal. Everybody's weird. Speaking of Weird Science, a teen comedy from the 80s in which two nerdy boys create an artificial woman, another sense of weird is odd or unusual in an unsettling way. The near synonym uncanny is often used to describe the unsettlingly similar, as in the case of Uncanny Valley, which describes the discomfort that one experiences seeing a representation of something that is similar, but not similar enough to a healthy natural human likeness, like an artificial human automaton. But there's another twist in this etymology. The word Worm probably also comes from that same turning root. Makes sense when you think about a Worm. But the word Worm in Old English was used of a dragon or serpent, like the dragon that Beowulf fights at the end of his eponymous Old English epic poem. And that brings us back to the Old English word Weird, which occurs some 12 times in the poem, such as Gaffa weird, Swahio shell goes always weird as it shall, which some scholars have held up as another prime example, like Ragnarok, of fatalism in Germanic culture. The heroism of the great warrior Beowulf fighting a losing battle and sacrificing his life to save his people. Speaking of Old English, perhaps unsurprisingly the translation of Boethius' Latin consolation of philosophy into Old English by King Alfred the Great uses the word weird to render the concept of fate or fortune. And some have argued for a direct connection between this philosophical work and the epic poem Beowulf and a bridge between the old pagan worldview and the new Christian religion. But the word Worm in the sense of a small serpent also brings us back to Shakespeare's Macbeth who comments after his assassins have killed Banquo but allowed his son Fleance to escape. There the grown serpent lies the Worm that's fled has nature that in time will then imbred no teeth for the present. And to bring us full circle, one other derivative from that proto-Indo-European turning route is anniversary meaning literally turning of the year. And since April 23rd, 2016 is the 400th anniversary of the day that, to quote William Shakespeare himself, death hath made worms meat of him it turns out that releasing this video now is weirdly appropriate. Thanks for watching. If you've enjoyed these etymological explorations and cultural connections please subscribe to this channel or share it. You can also sign up for email notifications of new videos in the description below. And check out our Patreon page where you can make a contribution to help me make more videos. 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