Anthony Winterbourne, When the Norns Have Spoken: Time and Fate in Germanic Paganism. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-8386-4048-6. $39.50.

When I first saw this book listed by an online book dealer, the question that immediately entered my head was, why?  After all, Paul Bauschatz covered this topic definitively twenty years ago in his classic, The Well and the Tree: World and Time in Early Germanic Culture, and Winterbourne, a little-known former university lecturer who had never before ventured into this field, seemed an unlikely candidate to expand our knowledge.

After reading the book, I am left with the same question.  In six short chapters totaling just 125 pages of text, Winterbourne never comes close to achieving the task he sets for himself: "to confront the question of just what fate means, or what it meant to those people who employed over centuries a range of cognate terms in the Germanic languages for it - 'Urðr,' 'wurt,' 'wurd,' 'wyrd,' etc."  The book's failure is the result, to a large extent, of the author's endemic reluctance to focus.  Among the myriad digressions that come between Winterbourne and his enterprise is a recurring preoccupation with the logical properties of "fatalism," even though he acknowledges early on that this concept is a modern one that is altogether different from, and in important ways contradictory to, the pre-Christian Germanic notion of destiny, fate, or wyrd.  What we're left with, much of the time, reads like argument for argument's sake.

Winterbourne's bibliography is suggestive of broad exposure to modern Old Norse scholarship, but one may fairly question the depth of the author's familiarity with this material.  For example, at one point Winterbourne quotes a few stanzas from the skaldic poem Darraðarljóð (although not giving its name), mistakenly citing it as an example of the weaving of battle-fate by the Norns.  In fact, however, other stanzas of this poem -- which Winterbourne does not quote -- make it clear that the bloody weaving is being performed not by Norns but by valkyries -- six of whom are mentioned by name!  The reader is entitled to wonder whether Winterbourne has actually read the poem in its entirety, or based his argument on an excerpt taken from some other secondary source.

Although (or because?) Winterbourne's grasp of specifically Norse mythology often seems tentative, he is quick to fill in the gaps with generous dollops of comparative religion, seizing upon whatever broad similarities seem useful to him in a given context, from Plato to ancient Babylon to the Koran.  At one critical point in his exposition, Winterbourne actually invokes Middle Egyptian, linking the nature of Yggdrasill to the god Ptah.  While the main result of this method is to reduce much of the book to formless generalities, it occasionally leads to inadvertent humor, as in Winterbourne's unfortunate observation that "cosmic-trees, such as Yggdrasill and other trees of fate, are clearly generated from a common mythological root stock."  Perhaps this should be dubbed the "one-root-fits-all" theory.

Given his generally uncritical use of virtually any source that comes to hand, it is perhaps not surprising that Winterbourne actually tracks the cranky speculations of Victor Rydberg in a rather bizarre chapter on Old Norse cosmogony.  Characteristically, Winterbourne admits at the outset that the pre-Christian Norse had no such concept, but he somehow thinks it important to provide them with one after the fact.  While Bauschatz correctly scoffed at Rydberg's nonsensical belaboring of the supposed orientation and "placement" of the roots of Yggdrasill, Winterbourne devotes some 20 pages to essentially the same project.  Ultimately, he follows Rydberg in plastering over the manifest contradictions and non-sequiturs generated by this endeavor with leaps of supposition, etymological speculation, and yet more comparative religion.  As one might expect, the conflicting, near-contemporary evidence of Snorri Sturluson is dismissed out of hand.  Winterbourne sees Snorri's work as expressing "his pagan ancestors fumbl[ing] toward the truth of Christianity"; he assigns much more weight to such widely recognized authorities on Norse paganism as Oswald Spengler, Ernst Cassirir, and Immanuel Kant.

Many of this book's scholarly shortcomings might be forgiven if Winterbourne compensated with a witty or engaging writing style.  But he doesn't.  On the contrary, Winterbourne's prose is at once turgid and pedantic, typified by sentences like: "We must start with some notion of abstract time, and contrast it with mythical time as its supposed negation, putting aside for the moment any reservations we might entertain concerning the post-Newtonian transformation wrought by physics and quantum theory on this conception, and keeping in mind also that the time (and space) of physics has always been disconnected from the spatiotemporal experiences of man, being an idealization of that experience, not a description of it."  If a writer submitted that sort of writing to me for editing, I would see only two choices: either to shoot myself, or shoot him.  As it is, I can only grimace and plow ahead, trying not to calculate how much I paid for that sentence.

Although I myself claim no special connection to the Norns, I can clearly foresee three things lying in this book's future.  First, it will be completely ignored by mainstream Old Norse scholarship.  Second, in about six months it will begin to appear in remaindered bins at bookshops around the country, marked down to $3.99. Third, at that point it will be discovered by the many proto-racist, New Age, and "neopagan" Internet forums and e-lists, which will promptly hail this as the work of the century, proclaiming Winterbourne to be the new Rydberg.  A grim fate for anyone with scholarly pretensions, but in this case, hardly undeserved.

Reviewed by R. S. Radford
(c) 2006. All rights reserved.
Reproduction of this review in any form, in whole or in part, without express written permission is prohibited.