Customer Reviews

When the Norns Have Spoken: Time and Fate in Germanic Paganism

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I had fairly high hopes for this book. After all the title and the blurb sound very promising. I thought that perhaps we might be treated to a structural analysis of Old Norse and Old English sources with some comparative elements thrown in. Unfortunately, that is not possible because, as far as I can tell, Mr Winterborne doesn't read any of the old languages (he does seem to read French and Modern High German).

One area where this book makes a modest contribution to the theory is in the idea of fate and time being somewhat separate. However, this would be more impressive if properly grounded in primary sources.

What follows then is a free ranging discussion about the author's attempts to deal with some sort of homogeneous view of "destiny" an hence put Norse fatalism into a larger perspective. While such of a work might have potential if the author was able to discuss Norse concepts of fate on their own as they relate to textual sources, the approach fails miserably when applied in the way he does-- via brief discussions of secondary scholarship and sources in translation (some of which the translator has made structural changes to the translation vs the original).

To be sure this was never intended to be a work of comparative mythology or philology but rather philosophy. However, in trying to explore the history of ideas without making a serious attempt to explore the structures of any of the works in their original documents, the work falls flat on its face.

I am sure some of the author's other more purely philosophical works may be of more value, but this book really is not.