The Norns
I’m reading my historical novels about the Saxons and the Danes, and every once in a while the protagonist muses about fate. He’s a pagan, so he talks about fate in terms of the Norns, one spinning, one measuring, one cutting. Life is a thread, yada yada yada. The Greeks have a similar myth, which suggests a common origin in the mists of prehistory. On the other hand, the metaphor only makes sense to cultures who have mastered spinning, so one wonders what the earlier explanation might have been. But I digress.
It occurs to me that the modern equivalent of the Norns is… writers. Novelists. Script-writers. Press secretaries. Life is a story, a story is a tapestry, writing is weaving. If the protagonist of the historical novels could have an out-of-book experience, he might say:
Forget the Norns! Bernard Cornwell controls my fate. Things are pretty quiet right now, but there are four more chapters to go. Either something totally unexpected is going to happen, or I’m going to do something really stupid. He’s not going to kill me off, because then there’s no sequel, but I’m probably going to get jerked around for the next couple of chapters.
But these are Saxons and Danes. Postmodernism is a thousand years in the future. We preserve the Norns’ metaphor in our language every time we hold a press conferences in a “spin room”.