Thor and Odin sit at the top of the Norse cosmic food chain, yet even they were at the mercy of shadowy female figures who wove the destiny of the entire universe and could not be overruled. This deep dive draws on encyclopedia entries, runic records, and analyses of the Poetic and Prose Eddas to explain who the Norns were, why Urd, Verdandi, and Skuld are not a neat past-present-future timeline, and how their daily labor of pouring holy water and white clay on the roots of Yggdrasil kept a decaying cosmos from collapsing.

The episode reveals that the three primary Norns were giantesses whose arrival ended the golden age of the gods, and that a whole population of lesser Norns drawn from the Aesir, elves, and dwarves attend every birth, a system that explained the random unfairness of life. It follows the Norns physically weaving the hero H ...