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The supposed proof of this is that each sister exercises the special function of one of the Norns. "The third is the special prophetess, whilst the first takes cognizance of the past, and the second of the present, in affairs connected with humanity. These are the tasks of Urda, Verdandi, and Skulda.
The room is fetid; the coffee steams eternally on the stove; and from her chair in the warmest corner Urda speaks out to the listening men, who shake their heads with joy as they hear the pure old Icelandic flow in sweet rhythm from between her lips.
'Tis the air that makes the dancing shadows." But Urda shakes her head, and points with her dried finger, and those who stand beside her see figures moving, and airy shapes, and contortions of strange things, such as are seen in a beryl stone.
The next week at the church gathering, when all the sledges stopped at the house of Urda's granddaughter, they said it was so that John Christianson's wife Margaret never heard the voice of her son, but that he breathed thrice in his nurse's arms and died. "Three sledges run over the snow toward Milton," says Urda; "all are laden with wheat, and in one is a stranger.
So the men who know that it is given to the mothers of earth to be very wise, stop their six part singing, or their jangles about the free-thinkers, and give attentive ear when Urda Bjarnason lights her pipe and begins her tale. She is very old.
"But Urda Bjarnason," says Ingeborg Christianson, the pert young wife with the blue-eyed twins, "why is it we see these things only when we stand beside you and you help us to the sight?" "Because," says the mother, with a steel-blue flash of her old eyes, "having eyes ye will not see!" Then the men laugh. They like to hear Ingeborg worsted.
This question of applicability, however, must not be decided by the consideration of a single sentence, but of the whole passage from which it is extracted; and, whilst considering it, it should be carefully borne in mind that it occurs immediately before those lines which are chiefly relied upon as proving the identity of the sisters with Urda, Verdandi, and Skulda.
For, by the shade of Nora Finnegan, you shall be hungry no more!" WHEN Urda Bjarnason tells a tale all the men stop their talking to listen, for they know her to be wise with the wisdom of the old people, and that she has more learning than can be got even from the great schools at Reykjavik.
Standing so straight and tall, with the sheen of the moon on her faultless features, he thought she looked the incarnation of some prescient Norn, fit for the well of Urda. She made no reply; and he touched his hat, and rode rapidly away in the direction of the town, carrying an indelible impression of the mysterious picture under the pines.
In addition to this, the natural sequence is in many cases utterly and unnecessarily violated; as, for instance, in Act I. sc. iii., where Urda, who should be solely occupied with past matters, predicts, with extreme minuteness, the results that are to follow from her projected voyage to Aleppo, and that without any expression of resentment, but rather with promise of assistance, from Skulda, whose province she is thus invading.
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