Wyrd

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Wyrd

“Fate often saves an undoomed man when his courage is good.”-- Beowulf

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the Anglo-Saxon word “wyrd” means “the principal, power, or agency by which events are predetermined; fate, destiny.” The Anglo-Saxon understanding of fate is not all too different from our modern understanding and applies to both Christian and pagan beliefs. Fate is a force that controls a man’s life regardless of his actions. Fate is usually seen as three women, sometimes blind, who weave the thread of a man’s life and cut it when it is his time to die.

In Anglo-Saxon literature, fate, its power and the doom it can bring are often referred to. In “The Wanderer,” an elegy that laments the narrator’s dead lord, the narrator states that “All earth’s kingdom is wr...

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