Creatures of an Elder World: In Pursuit of Shakespeare’s Three Witches
Linda Raedisch
A few Christmases ago, when my older daughter gave my younger daughter a copy of Doctor Who: The Visual Dictionary (Updated and Expanded), she stuck Post-It notes over all the alien faces she feared might give her little sister nightmares. Those notes have since been removed, but I’m all for slapping them back on the ghastly mugs of the Carrionites. The Carrionites, for those of you unacquainted with the Whoniverse, are a malevolent race from the Rexel planetary system. They ride on broomsticks and work magic through the use of cantrips, poppets, and scrying bowls. And man are they ugly!
When three especially nasty Carrionites attempt to use the Globe Theatre as a platform for world domination, it is, of course, up to the Doctor to stop them. This all happened back in 1599, time enough for the Carrionites to inspire Shakespeare to create the characters of the Three Witches in Macbeth.
But let’s get real. In the first folio of Macbeth, Shakespeare doesn’t call these characters “Witches” at all, but “weyard women.” Weyard, in modern spelling, is weird, a word we’ll examine more closely later. Shakespeare did not invent the otherworldly creatures who nudged the Thane of Glamis to his doom; he borrowed them from historical writers who had drafted them from older chronicles still and ultimately from oral tradition.
When Macbeth and Banquo first encounter them on the moors, the Weird Sisters appear in their primordial forms, looking more like features of the landscape than mortal women. When Banquo says, “What are these / So withered and so wild in their attire, / That look not like th’ inhabitants o’ th’ earth, / And yet are on’t?” we can be sure his hair is standing on end. These creatures appear not to belong to the world of men. Banquo is surprised when they “seem to understand” him, while Macbeth commands them, “Speak if you can,” as if they might not be capable of human speech.
If you want to meet up with Macbeth’s Witches today, you might want to start looking in the neighborhood of the Moray Firth, specifically in the town of Forres, inside the glass case housing a late Pictish monument known as Sueno’s Stone.
If you want to meet up with Macbeth’s Witches today, you might want to start looking in the neighborhood of the Moray Firth, specifically in the town of Forres, inside the glass case housing a late Pictish monument known as Sueno’s Stone. Sueno’s Stone commemorates the victory of one early Scottish king over another—not, however, Malcolm’s victory over Macbeth, for the stone was already old in their time. According to one story, the Weird Sisters are imprisoned here, drawn inside the stone like genies into a lamp or like Carrionites into the crystal ball in which the Doctor eventually trapped them (“Spoilers!”).
Another logical place to look is the nearby Macbeth’s Hillock where the Thane of Glamis is supposed to have first clapped eyes on the women who would tell him his destiny. Rippling with purple heather, thistles, and heavy-headed grasses, the Hillock is hardly the bleak and “blasted” heath that Shakespeare makes it out to be. Did the Weird Sisters ever actually appear here?
In his Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels, Thomas Heywood (a contemporary of Shakespeare) has “Mackbeth and Banco-Stuart” riding along “in a darke Grove” on that fateful day. And Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577), of which Shakespeare certainly owned a copy, has the two men “passing through wodes and fieldes” where they behold “iii women in straunge and ferly apparel, resembling creatures of an elder worlde.” Scotland was a lot woodsier prior to the mid-1800s when many of its forests, like Birnam Wood, were cleared away, but Shakespeare must have felt that a barren heath better foreshadowed the doom that was to befall Macbeth.
So why did Shakespeare sketch such a frightful portrait of [the Weird Sisters] in Macbeth ? The answer lies with Shakespeare’s patron, King James I, newly arrived from Scotland and one of the most Witchophobic monarchs in history.
In the cast of characters in later folios of Macbeth, Shakespeare introduces the ladies as “Three Witches, the Weird Sisters,” to distinguish them, one supposes, from ordinary Witches. They had never before been identified as such but as “three Virgins wondrous faire” (Heywood) and “the weird sisters … the Goddesses of Destinie, or else some Nimphes or Feiries” (Holinshed). The closest Holinshed comes to calling them Witches is to suggest that they might be “endewed with knowledge of prophecie by their necromanticall science.”
They certainly don’t look like Witches in the woodcut accompanying the account in the Chronicles. Dressed to the nines in puffed sleeves, surcoats, and brocade skirts, they’re fashionable women of the times. So why did Shakespeare sketch such a frightful portrait of them in Macbeth?
The answer lies with Shakespeare’s patron, King James I, newly arrived from Scotland and one of the most Witchophobic monarchs in history. You can’t really blame James; horror stories concerning Witches had been circulating within the Scottish royal house long before Macbeth picked up a dagger. In 968, a company of Forres Witches were executed for roasting a waxen image of King Duffus as well as attempting to poison him. In 1537, the beautiful Janet Douglas, Lady Glamis, was accused of using her deadly charms against James V of Scotland. The king survived, but Janet, whom many believed to be innocent, was burned at the stake.
And then, in 1590, John Fian, aka the “Devil’s secretary,” allegedly conjured a storm to sink a ship carrying James VI (later James I of England) and his Danish bride. Though the assassination attempt failed, John Fian was tortured and burned along with a handful of his North Berwick coven. Considering this family history of Witch burning, along with his own personal experience, James may even have felt that Shakespeare had not laid the loathliness on thickly enough. Sure, the Three Witches are ugly, but they never actually plot against the king; they only prophesy.
The Weird Sisters’ number is the one thing Shakespeare, Heywood, Holinshed, and Andrew of Wyntoun, scribbling his own version of events in the early fifteenth century, can agree on. In Scotland, as elsewhere in the Jacobean world, thirteen was the norm for coven membership. Unearthly women who appear consistently in threes are necessarily of older stock. Heywood calls them simply “Virgins” and “Maids,” but Wyntoun and Holinshed both include the term “weird sisters.” Weird is a loaded word, coming from the Old English wyrd, meaning “fate.” Weirdness, then, did not denote strangeness, though Holinshed’s women do, in fact, appear “straunge”—that is, they cause one to wonder, to be astonished. (Holinshed’s “ferly” means just about the same as Heywood’s “wondrous.”) Yes, these women are beautiful, but it is such a strange sort of beauty that you have to wonder if it is real. The Weird Sisters, then, are no ordinary Witches but are the embodiment of wyrd, the whole of one’s past, present, and future.
The Norns, like most women of the Bronze, Iron, and Middle Ages, spent much of their time twirling their spindles. The Norns spin the threads of destiny, snipping them off when our numbers are up.
The Norsemen called them Norns, and while the sagas mention many Norns—so many that at times “Norn” seems to be an ethnic identity or a member of an international secret society—the three most important are Urd, Verdandi, and Skuld, whose names can be translated as “becoming,” “being,” and “that which will be.” The noun wyrd comes from weorthan, “to become,” which has the secondary meaning of “to turn.” The Norns, like most women of the Bronze, Iron, and Middle Ages, spent much of their time twirling their spindles. The Norns spin the threads of destiny, snipping them off when our numbers are up.
By Macbeth’s time, the Vikings, along with their reverence for the Norns, had been ensconced in Orkney and the Outer Hebrides for over a hundred years. Old Sueno, or “Sven,” whose name became associated with the stone at Forres, was also a Norseman. As the eleventh century progressed, the Scots (already an amalgam of immigrant Gaels and native Picts) would be running into these Germanic settlers more and more often, no longer just on the battlefield but also at weddings and christenings.
Imagine yourself as a loyal subject of the Kingdom of Alba (northern Scotland) and a member of either the Celtic or the Pictish Church, as your family has been for generations. You’ve been invited to a christening—a “name fastening,” they call it—by one of your Nordic neighbors. Seated in the richly decorated hall, you’re slightly repulsed by the Pagan atmosphere prevailing at the feast. The jarl is at least a nominal Christian, but old traditions die hard. As you dip your bannock in the broth, careful to avoid the chunks of horsemeat floating in it, you notice three old ladies hovering over the cradle on the dais. They’re being treated as honored guests despite their dirty shawls, the plainness of their brooches, and the fact that they have brought no gift for the child except a bunch of leeks.
In fact, they have brought gifts, just not ones that you can see. These homely women are spaewives, mortal representatives of the Norns, born with the gift of second sight, come to tell the newborn’s fortune. After they have spoken their part, they retire to a corner of the hall to enjoy their meal, share the gossip of the countryside, and, no doubt, get a little spinning done.
The Norns belong to the Germanic cosmos, but such spirits are, in fact, a broader Indo-European phenomenon. They have been with us since the invention of the drop spindle. Like the Norns, the Greek Fates occupied themselves with the spinning, measuring, and cutting of the threads of destiny. The Scandinavian Urd, whose name is an Old Norse cognate of the Old English Wyrd, was sometimes identified as the oldest of the Norns and may once have been a singular goddess of fate. Skuld was said to be the youngest of the Norns, which would suggest that at one time there were only two. And indeed, the Hittites, whose language was one of the first to branch off from the trunk of the Indo-European language tree, recognized only two spinning goddesses of the underworld: Istustaya and Papaya. These ladies could be found busily twirling their spindles on a Black Sea beach. They also possessed “filled mirrors,” which were probably vessels of water in which they descried the future—precursors, perhaps, of the mirror in which Shakespeare’s Macbeth observed the succession of Banquo’s sons.
The purpose of spinning is to make thread for weaving into cloth: mantles, bed curtains, banners, and the brightly embroidered pennants that warriors tied to the shafts of their spears. Battles were a favorite subject of tapestries, from the rich hangings in a Viking jarl’s hall to the Bayeux “Tapestry” (actually crewelwork on a plain linen ground) commemorating William of Normandy’s conquest of England in 1066. In the Saga of Helgi Hundingsbane, the Norns presiding over Helgi’s birth weave an immense tapestry depicting the hero’s destiny. And in Njal’s Saga, twelve Valkyries, close cousins of the Norns, weave the outcome of the Battle of Clontarf, before it’s fought, on a bloody warp of men’s intestines.
Like the saga writers who recounted these dreamlike episodes, Andrew of Wyntoun tells us that Macbeth met the Weird Sisters not in real time but “in his dremynge.” In the dream, Macbeth is out hunting in the forest with his greyhounds when he meets three women in passing. This sounds very much like an adventure of the legendary Høther in The History of the Danes, an amalgam of history and myth compiled in the early thirteenth century. Høther, too, is out on the hunt when he runs into some “forest maidens” idling outside their house. They greet Høther by name, even though he has never seen them before, and explain to him how they haunt the fields of battle, awarding success to those they favor and defeat to those they do not. They offer Høther a piece of advice concerning his rivalry with the demigod Balder and then they vanish, just as Holinshed’s women do, leaving “Makbeth and Banquho” to suppose it had been “some vayne fantasticall illusion.”
Høther meets the women while awake, but then, Høther’s whole life is like a dream. He has a magic sword and an impenetrable coat of mail. Gods wander in and out of his adventures. Had Macbeth never acted upon his vision of the Weird Sisters, maybe that’s all it would have been: a dream.9 The Norns spin, measure, and cut the threads of our lives, but it’s up to us to dye them.
The Three Witches’ true abode is not anywhere in Scotland (or in the Rexel planetary system) but in the shade of Yggdrasil, the ancient ash tree whose three roots are planted in the sacred white mud of the underworld. Its trunk rises up, spindle-straight, through the Nine Worlds of the Norse cosmos, of which our world, Manheim, is the fifth. Where in Manheim you happen to meet the Three Witches is wherever you meet your destiny.
While I was in the home stretch of this article’s first draft, I suddenly realized that, in a way, the Weird Sisters had been a fixture of my childhood. I had three “aunts” who did everything together, so much so that we had a collective name for them: the “West Orangers,” after the old house they shared on a leafy street in West Orange, New Jersey. (The name stuck even after they moved to Lakewood.) Their house was crammed with porcelain dolls, grandfather clocks, Austrian beeswax sculptures, and other mementos of a lifetime spent traveling together. The West Orangers weren’t sisters, and none of them actually spun, but they were never without their knitting. One of them was my godmother, so all three attended my birthday parties, bulging bags of yarn in tow. Aunt Dot, a widow, was the oldest by a decade or more. She would be Urd. Aunt Ellen, a “spinster,” was the youngest by only a few weeks, but she was far and away the most girlish of the three. She would be Skuld. That left my godmother, the divorcée Aunt Fran, to fill the role of Verdandi.
Aunt Fran liked to give me books for Christmas and birthdays, a tradition our family carries on to this day. While planning my own book, The Old Magic of Christmas, I turned repeatedly to the “Christmas around the World” books she had ordered for me over the years. Could she have guessed that I was going to be a writer, specifically a chronicler of obscure traditions? All three of the West Orangers are gone now, so all I can do is wonder who might get this book for a Christmas or birthday present and where it might take them.
Sources Not Mentioned in the Text
Aitchison, Nick. Macbeth: Man and Myth. Gloucester, England: Sutton Publishing, 2000.
Briggs, K. M. Pale Hecate’s Team: An Examination of the Beliefs on Witchcraft and Magic among Shakespeare’s Contemporaries and His Immediate Successors. New York: The Humanities Press, 1962.
Bryce, Trevor. Life and Society in the Hittite World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Taylor, Cameron, and Alistair Murray. On the Trail of the Real Macbeth, King of Alba. Edinburgh: Luath Press, 2008.
Linda Raedisch makes a point of looking for the otherworldly in the everyday. To date, she has written two books for Llewellyn and more articles than she can easily count. Though the walls of her home are now lined with reference books, including the fateful “Christmas around the World” series, she’s just as likely to find inspiration in an episode of Doctor Who or by gazing into the depths of a strong cup of tea.
Illustrator: Jennifer Hewitson
9. The Norns spun a very different lifespan for the real Macbeth, who came by his throne fair and square and died in battle at Lumphanan after a long and more or less peaceful reign.