Originally published as 'Inevitable Tales' in 'Unsettling Wonder' Issue 6, September 2017
Nothing,
they say, is sure but death and taxes. By creating a comic equivalence between
two such different but universally unpopular processes, the maxim succinctly
acknowledges the trials of life and the inevitability of death. It's a bleak lookout – and so there are many traditional stories in which the impotence of humanity in the face of what seems a hostile or indifferent
world is mitigated by endowing the universe with purpose.
Kismet – fate, destiny, quadr, karma, doom, wyrd –
across the world these similar yet subtly different concepts have sprung up as
responses to the same anxiety. They reassure that whatever good or evil may
befall us is somehow meant to be, intended, written in the stars. Kismet is the
opposite of luck. Luck is happenstance, the random fall of the dice. Kismet is
destiny ordained by a higher power. In ‘The Lord of the Rings’ Gandalf tells
Frodo it is so unlikely that the Ring would abandon Gollum only to be picked up
by Bilbo from the Shire, that some mysterious purpose must be involved:
‘Behind
that there was something else at work, beyond any design of the Ring-maker. I
can put in no plainer than by saying Bilbo was meant to have the Ring,
and not by its maker. In which case you also were meant to have
it. And that may be an encouraging thought.’
Possession
of the Ring is a calamity. When times are bad, it helps to hold on to the idea
that there is meaning behind it all, but how, or whose? Answers vary according
to the ways different cultures, philosophies and religions express their
world-views.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary the word
‘kismet’ is derived from the Arabic kisma(t), meaning ‘portion,
division, lot’. From the outset then, kismet implies something received, not
chosen: your allotted measure, your just deserts.
One of the neatest tales of kismet is to be found in
the Babylonian Talmud, c. 500 CE. In sukkah 53a, 7-16, Rabbi Johanen tells a
story to illustrate the saying: A man’s
feet are responsible for him; they lead him to the place where he is
wanted.
King
Solomon had two Cushite scribes, Elihoreph and Ahyah. One day the King noticed
that the Angel of Death was looking downcast. ‘Why are you so downcast?’ he
asked. ‘Because the lives of your two scribes have been demanded of me,’
replied the Angel. In order to save the scribes, Solomon spirited them away to
the district of Luz, where both men immediately died. On the following day the
Angel of Death was in a cheerful mood, and again Solomon asked him why.
‘Because,’ said the Angel, ‘you sent your scribes to the very place where I was
meant to slay them.’
The
story shows that there is no escaping what God has ordained, for although he is
not directly mentioned it cannot doubted that it is God’s demand which the
Angel of Death is bound to fulfil.
Other stories of kismet begin at a child’s birth and
concern themselves with prophecies of his or her future. Despite or even
because of efforts to prevent them, prophecies in stories always come true. In the
Grimms’ fairy tale ‘The Devil With The Three Golden Hairs’ (KHM 29), a prophecy
is made at the birth of a poor boy that he will grow up to marry the king’s
daughter. Learning of this, the king persuades the parents to give him the
child, promising to adopt him, but instead places him in a box and throws him
into a river to drown.
The baby is rescued, however, and brought up by poor but
kindly millers: when he is grown the king discovers him and tries again to have
him killed by sending him to the queen with a sealed letter ordering his
execution. On the way, robbers shelter the boy, examine the letter and alter it
to command the boy’s immediate marriage to the princess. And so the king’s
efforts to confound the prophecy actually bring it to pass.
This kind of story is Aarne-Thompson Tale Type 930,
‘Prophecy’. Closely related to it is the tale of Oedipus (AT 931). Laius, King
of Thebes, learns from the Delphic Oracle that his son will murder him.
According to different versions of the myth, Laius either pierces his baby
son’s feet and exposes him on Mount Cithaeron, or seals him in a chest and
casts him into the sea. In either case the child is adopted by the queen of
Corinth, who pretends to have given birth to him. Growing up ignorant of his
parentage, Oedipus kills Laius in an altercation on the road and marries his
mother Jocasta. Once again the prophecy is fulfilled through the king’s very
efforts to avert it. Much of the fascination of tales of this kind comes from
watching the machinery of destiny inexorably at work.
 |
If prophecies predict the future, can they be said to
cause it? The answer to that depends very much on context. The Delphic Oracle
spoke for the god Apollo, but there is no sense that Apollo takes a personal
interest in Oedipus’ misfortunes. For the God of the Old Testament the case is
less clear. The story of Joseph in the Book of Genesis is thick with prophetic
dreams: not just those of Joseph himself but of Pharoah too, and his baker and
butler. Joseph famously dreams that while binding sheaves in the field, his
sheaf of corn stands upright while those of his eleven brothers bow down to
him; also that ‘the sun, the moon and the eleven stars’ bow down before him.
And he
told it to his father and to his brethren: and his father rebuked him and said
unto him […] Shall I and thy mother and
thy brethren indeed come to bow down ourselves to thee to the earth?’
Genesis
37, 10
To
prevent the prophecy from coming true, Joseph’s brothers sell him as a slave
into Egypt, a course of action which initiates his rise to power as Pharoah’s
most trusted servant and governor of all the land; when famine strikes,
Joseph’s brothers journey to Egypt in search of grain and do indeed bow down
before him.
There seems no particular reason why any of the characters
in the stories we have looked at so far should be singled out by fate. None are
especially good or bad. We are told nothing about the characters of Elihoreph
and Ahyah, we only see that their time has come. Oedipus did not want or intend
to murder his father or marry his mother. For the young hero of ‘The Devil With
The Three Golden Hairs’, it’s not so much that he deserves to succeed as that
the wicked king deserves to fail, and the same is true of Joseph and his
brothers. Joseph’s story is in style, and affect, a fairy tale. He reports his
dreams, and correctly interprets those of others, but he is not required to act
upon them. His father Jacob was touched by holiness: spoke to God, even
wrestled with him – but Joseph has no one-on-one relationship with God, and his
qualities remain those of a fairy tale hero: ordinary morals and a good work
ethic. He does not earn his destiny, it is bestowed upon him, unfolding as a
consequence of the actions of others and the mysterious will of God.
A story which does require some action on the part of
the dreamer is ‘The Pedlar of Swaffham’, an English tale first recorded in the
17th century. A pedlar of Swaffham in Norfolk dreams that if he
travels to London and stands upon London Bridge, he will hear good news. At
first he doubts the dream, but after its third repetition he puts it to the
test. Arriving in London he stands day after day on the bridge, but nothing
happens. Finally a curious shopkeeper asks the pedlar what he is doing, the
pedlar explains his dream and the shopkeeper bursts out laughing.
‘I’ll
tell thee, country fellow, last night I dreamed I was in Swaffham, where me thought
behind a pedlar’s house in a certain orchard and under a great oak tree, if I
digged, I should find a vast treasure! Now think you,’ says he, ‘that I am such
a fool as to take such a long journey on the instigation of a silly dream? No,
no, I’m wiser.’
Naturally
the pedlar hurries home, digs a hole in his own orchard and finds the treasure.
Significantly, while the pedlar dreams only of unspecified ‘good news’, the shopkeeper’s
dream contains every detail needed to find the treasure. The pedlar
however, trusts in and acts upon his dream, while the shopkeeper’s scepticism
and failure to act deprives him of the treasure and brings the pedlar his
reward. The town of Swaffham celebrates the story to this day:
The story certainly is not asking us to believe that
God was concerned in enriching the Pedlar of Swaffham. (Unless, as I sometimes
wonder, it began life as a sixteenth-century pulpit parable, with the good
news turning out to be the Gospels and the treasure explained as salvation.) At
any rate, in the form we have it the tale sends a more general and cautious
message: ‘Trust, and all will be for the best’. But trust in what, or in whom?
Need providence be a personal Providence? To put it another way, do we live in
a moral universe? What about karma?
Karma may be a bit of a sixties buzz-word, but its
original Sanskrit meaning refers to a spiritual principle of cause and effect:
the events of a person’s life, good or bad, are the consequence of his or her actions
and intentions in previous lives and are therefore quite literally earned or
deserved. In one of the Buddhist Jatakas a princess, Rujā, explains to her
father King Angati why it is that in spite of appearances Alāta, a general, is
in a worse moral state than Bījaka, a slave:
I will
tell thee a parable, O king. As the ship of merchants, heavy through taking in
too large a cargo, sinks overladen into the sea, so a man, accumulating sin
little by little, sinks overladen into hell … Formerly Alāta’s deeds were
righteous, and it is as their result that he enjoys this prosperity. That merit
of his is being spent, for he is all intent upon vice…
As the
balance properly hung in the weighing house causes the end to swing up when the
weight is put in, so does a man cause his fate at last to rise if he gathers
together every piece of merit little by little, like that slave Bījaka intent
on merit.
Jataka
544, tr. E.B. Cowell and W.H.D. Rouse, 1907
So… is anyone in charge, or is this just how the
universe works? It’s not entirely clear. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (7th
century BCE), speaking of the self or soul, explains: ‘As is its desire, so is
its resolution; and as is its resolution, so is its deed; and whatever deed it
does, that it reaps.’ What goes around comes around: the idea that karma means
reaping what you sow has proved attractive to Western audiences accustomed by
Christianity to ideas of judgement, reward and retribution. Less easy to grasp
is the tranquil assertion that follows these lines: in order to escape the
world and be united with the non-personal ultimate reality, Brahman, the self
must be free from all desires, good or bad. Brahman is a difficult
metaphysical concept. It must be distinguished from the Hindu creator god
Brahma, who – scholars suggest – may have emerged from it at a later date, a
personification people found easier to engage with, and more comprehensible.
In a story collected by G. R. Subramiah Pantalu in
‘Folk-Lore of the Telegus’ (1905) not only is karma inevitable, but Brahma
seems to control it. The god Siva and his wife Parvati see a poverty-stricken
Brahmin priest making his way home. Parvati wishes to gift him with gold, but
Siva tells her that Brahma has not written that the Brahmin should enjoy wealth
in this life. To test this, Parvati throws a thousand gold coins on the path,
but as the Brahmin approaches he finds himself suddenly wondering whether he
could walk along like a blind man. So, closing his eyes, he passes the coins
and never sees them…
Perhaps it’s always easier for people to believe in a
directed, personal fate than an impersonal one. For in this unfair and
difficult world of ours, don’t we yearn for good deeds to be rewarded, evil
deeds to be discovered and punished? ‘The Cranes of Ibycus’, a story found in
the 10th century Byzantine Encyclopaedia, tells of the murder of
Ibycus, a Greek poet:
Captured
by bandits in a deserted place he declared that the cranes which happened to be
flying overhead would be his avengers; he was murdered, but afterwards one of
the bandits saw some cranes in the city and exclaimed, ‘Look, the avengers of
Ibycus!’ Someone overheard and followed up his words: the crime was confessed
and the bandits paid the penalty; whence the proverbial expression ‘the cranes
of Ibycus’.
Trans. David
Campbell
In
this story there is no supernatural intervention: the birds do not speak and
their flight over the city might be providence or coincidence, but here – at
least in the sense the West understands it – we find karma’s cause and effect
at work in the space of a single life-time. The satisfactory neatness of the
murderer revealed by his own involuntary exclamation might belong to a modern
detective story – a genre which itself relies on and reinforces our yearning
for justice and right to prevail.
Precisely because fairy tales are not meant to be
realistic, they can satisfy that yearning for justice. In the make-belief world
of fairy tales everyone gets what they deserve. Many are the stories in which a
simple youngest brother or orphaned maiden shows pity to some animal, injured
or trapped, or shares a last crust with some poor old woman. In ‘The White
Snake’ (KHM 17) a kind-hearted prince who understands the speech of animals
returns three stranded fish to the water, avoids trampling on an ant-hill, and
feeds some starving ravens (by killing his horse, which may seem rather to
undo the good deed, but in this tale the horse must be regarded as an
extension of himself). In gratitude, the animals help him in a number of
difficult tasks. Generous acts in fairy tales are almost always rewarded. In
the Grimms’ tale ‘Mother Holle’ (KHM 24) the pretty, hardworking girl who jumps
down the well into Mother Holle’s otherworldly land behaves with courtesy and
kindness even to the inanimate objects which plead for her help. She takes
bread out of an oven so that it won’t burn, and shakes down apples from an
apple tree so the branches won’t break, and she works so diligently and well
for old Mother Holle that her reward is a shower of gold which covers her from
head to foot.
Karma brings like for like, however. The lazy, ugly
stepsister who ignores the pleas of the oven and the apple tree and refuses to
work for Mother Holle is showered with pitch, not gold. In fairy tales truth
always comes to light and evil deeds are discovered and punished. ‘The Singing
Bone’ (KHM 28) tells how two brothers go out to find and kill a dangerous boar.
The younger boy, whose heart is ‘pure and good’, kills the boar, but his
jealous elder brother murders him. Burying the body under a bridge, he takes
the credit for killing the boar and marries the King’s daughter.
‘But as
nothing remains hidden from God, so this black deed also came to light. Years
afterwards, a shepherd was driving his flock over the bridge and saw lying in
the sand beneath, a snow-white little bone...’
The
shepherd makes the bone into a mouthpiece for his horn, and when he blows on it
the bone begins to sing and denounce the brother for his murder. The rest of
the skeleton is found and the guilty man is put to death, while ‘the bones of
the murdered man were laid to rest in a beautiful tomb in the churchyard.’
In fairy tales, helping a dead man is the most
unselfish of acts, for surely the dead can never repay you? Hans Christian
Andersen’s story ‘The Travelling Companion’ tells of young Johannes who gives
away all his money to prevent evildoers from abusing the corpse of a man who
was in debt to them. Shortly afterwards he is joined on the road by the
‘travelling companion’ of the title who befriends and guides him, and helps him
to marry a princess whose luckless suitors must answer three riddles or die.
Reading the tale as a child I was thrilled when the wicked princess flies out
of the castle on black wings to visit her lover, a troll king… During the
course of the story the travelling companion teaches Johannes how to answer the
riddles, and succeeds in killing the troll and disenchanting the princess. When
Johannes thanks him and begs him to stay with them for ever, he replies:
‘No, I
must go. I have but paid my debt. Do you remember the dead man whom you
protected from wicked men in the church? You gave all you had so he might rest
in his grave. I am that dead man.’ And with that he vanished.
A
similar tale is ‘Beauty of the World’, told to William Larminie by Patrick
Minahan of Mainmore, County Donegal and reproduced in ‘West Irish Folktales’
(1893). A king’s son gives all the money in his purse so that a body can be
buried, and soon after is joined by a red-haired man who helps in his quest to
find the beautiful woman on whom his heart is set. After many adventures the
woman is won and the ‘red man’ declares:
It was I
that was in the coffin that day. When I saw you starting on your journey I went
to you to save you … Health be with you and blessing. You will set eyes on me
no more.
Stories
of the Grateful Dead (AT 506) have antecedents going back as far as the
apocryphal Book of Tobit. They proclaim that good actions will always be
rewarded, sometimes by God, sometimes by the less explicit workings of a mysterious
yet morally weighted universe.
As people have thought about fate or destiny,
different metaphors have emerged. Your deeds may be weighed in scales to
determine your fate in the next life. Or destiny may be something measured out
to you like grain: your portion or lot in life. In the Sermon on the Mount
(Matthew, 7:2), Jesus combines measurement and judgement with the words, ‘with
what judgement ye judge, ye shall be judged, and with what measure ye mete, it
shall be measured to you again.’ He speaks also of ‘the reaper drawing his pay
and gathering a crop for eternal life’ (John 4, 36). Like ‘kismet’, it seems
the Arabic term al-quadr, ‘divine fore-ordainment’ or ‘predestination’
is also derived from a root which means ‘to measure out’. Implicit in these
metaphors is an imagery of field-workers or servants judged worthy or not
worthy of their hire. In a patriarchal society the one who decides on and doles
out the wages is perceived as the ultimate Master, and so this metaphor mirrors
the unequal relationship between the human and the divine.
But there’s another equally ancient metaphor for fate
and it comes not from field-work, but from house-work. It compares the course
of a human life to a thread which is first spun, and then woven into cloth, and
ultimately cut with shears. Weaving was a woman’s work, and the Weavers of
destiny were women.
The Greek Moirae or ‘Apportioners’ were envisaged as
three old women, Clotho, ‘the spinner’, Lachesis, ‘the measurer’, and Atropos,
‘she who cannot be turned’. Clotho spun the thread of a person’s life on her
distaff, Lachesis measured it with her rod, and Atropos cut it with her shears.
In her book on the prehistory of weaving, ‘Women’s Work: The First 20,000
Years’ (1994) Elizabeth Wayland Barber points out a stock couplet that appears
‘almost verbatim’ twice in the Iliad and once in the Odyssey and which is
probably older than either:
He shall
endure all that his destiny and the heavy Spinners
Spun for
him with the thread at his birth, when his mother bore him.
Odyssey
Book 7, 197-98; Iliad Book 20, 127-28 & Book 24, 210, tr. R. Lattimore
An
imagery of spinning and weaving produces a different effect from one of
harvest, wages and worth. Judgment and payment are performed at the end of
a task, but spinning and weaving are tasks: dynamic, creative, ongoing
processes. Yes, the weaver holds the pattern of the cloth in her mind, but she
is free at any point to change it and do something different. Moreover, there
is no place in the weaving metaphor for blame or judgment. The woven pattern is
what it is: it is simply ‘what happens’. It cannot easily be made to represent
reward or punishment.
In Norse mythology the Norns are three maidens who sit
under Yggdrasil the World Tree, and ‘shape the lives of men’. Their names are
Urðr (‘that which has come to pass’), Verðandi (‘that which is happening’) and
Skuld (‘that which is owed’). The Poetic Edda tells of them setting up a huge
loom, with threads that stretch across the sky, to weave the destiny of a
prince. In her book ‘Roles of the Northern Goddess’ (1998) Hilda Ellis Davidson
provides a translation:
It was night in the dwelling. The
Norns came,
those who shaped the life of the
prince.
They foretold him to be the most
famed of warriors,
who would be reckoned the best of
rulers.
They
twisted firmly the threads of fate…
Set in
place the strands of gold,
held fast
in the midst of the hall of the moon.
East and
west they hid the ends…
while
Neri’s kinswoman knotted a cord
fast to
the north, and forbade it to break.
The
northern valkyries too, the ‘choosers of the slain’, were known as weavers of
destiny. ‘The Saga of Burnt Njal’ tells of a man of Caithness named Dorrud, who
on Good Friday saw twelve valkyries working on a warp-weighted loom, using
severed heads for the weights and intestines for the thread. As they wound the
finished cloth on to the loom beam, the women chanted a battle poem called ‘The
Song of the Spear’ including the lines ‘Valkyries decide/who lives or
dies.’ They then pulled down their
cloth, tore it in pieces and each holding a piece in her hand climbed on their
horses and rode off – presumably to war.
When in Old English poetry we meet the concept of
‘wyrd’ – ‘fate’ – there is often an interesting tension between it and the idea
of a Christian Providence. Though the Old English poem Beowulf is likely
the product of an 8th century Christian court, it harks back to the
heroic and pagan past, and much of its material probably existed in earlier
oral forms.
Wyrd oft
nereð/Unfaégne eorl ƿonne his ellen déah.
Fate
often spares a man not fated to die, when his courage is strong.
Beowulf,
572-3
The
modern English translation of this line appears to produce a tautology. Two
different terms are translated as ‘fate’. ‘Unfaégne’ means ‘not fated to
die’. But if a man isn’t fated to die, why is the state of his courage
even relevant? ‘Wyrd’ is not the same as ‘unfaégne’ however. Wyrd
is the Old English cognate of the Norse Urðr, the first of the Norns: not an
abstraction but a personification who might choose to spare a man.
(Shakepeare’s Weird Sisters are ‘wyrd’ not because they are strange, but
because they can show Macbeth his future.)
I sense that for the Beowulf poet, destiny was not unalterably written
in the stars, but something much more like a real-time decision that Wyrd might
make. The Norns do not foretell destiny, they weave it, so a
display of courage might influence them to change the pattern… In the same
poem, Hrothgar complains of the misery that the monster Grendel has inflicted
on him and his war-band:
Is min
fletwerod/wighéap gewaned; hie wyrd forsweop/on Grendles gryre. God éaƿe
maeg/ƿone dolsceaðan daéda/getwaefan.
[My
hall-companions fail me, my war-band wanes; fate has swept them into Grendel’s
grip. God may easily put an end to the deeds of this deadly foe.]
Here,
wyrd – again translated as fate – is used by Hrothgar to describe things that
have already happened, not things yet to come. His dead warriors were
doomed to die: whatever has happened in the past was clearly ‘meant to be’: yet
God if he wishes can easily alter the course of future events. And in contrast
to kismet and karma, there isn’t any sense that Hrothgar’s warriors deserve
their fate. Wyrd is ‘what happens’; it is not transactional, not linked to
personal morals. ‘Cattle die, kinsmen die,’ says Odin in the poem Hávamál in
the Poetic Edda:
Every man
is mortal,
But the
good name never dies
Of one
who has done well.
Tr. Paul
Taylor and W.H. Auden
In
the Norse world you had better behave well, because good behaviour wins you
fame – but in the end nothing can ward off wyrd. Wyrd/Urðr arises from a world-view that
believed even the gods would eventually perish at the hands (or teeth) of
monsters on the day of Ragnarok.
Finally: that word doom. We now think of doom as a
terrible fate lying in wait for us, but the word was originally without its
modern connotations of disaster. It is derived from Old Norse dómr, a
law or sentence. A kingdom is a land subject to the doom or law of a
king. God, however, is Lord and King of all Christendom, and as Christianity
spread to the Anglo-Saxons, the day of final judgement became known in England
as ‘Domesday’ or the Day of Doom. For those whose Last Day was to have been Ragnarok, I can see
the attraction of one in which God’s wrath would be softened by mercy towards
repentant sinners. In this new context wyrd became archaic and finally
obsolete, its meaning swallowed by Biblical concepts of measurement and
justice.
It seems to me that concepts of kismet and karma,
destiny and fate, have been driven by two things. One is a desire to make
narrative sense of our time in the world and reconcile ourselves to inevitable
death. If the Fates or Moirae or Norns spin the web of our lives, we know there
must be a pattern even if we can’t see it. And stories such as the Rabbi Johanen’s
parable, with which I began, make the point that since Death is bound to come,
there’s no sense worrying about when: moreover, as the personified
servant of God, endowed with human emotions such as sadness and cheerfulness,
he loses some of his terror.
The other driver is a very human desire for fairness
and justice in a demonstrably unfair world. Fairy tales provide us with
make-belief utopias in which the innocent and generous are rewarded and the
wicked punished. In an exactly balanced moral universe, karma delivers
perfectly measured consequences for all our actions – if not in this life, at
least in our next incarnation. Meanwhile, in a harsh northern world, wyrd urges
sturdy acceptance of life’s hardships.
I will leave you with a short story by Somerset Maugham which has resonances of Rabbi Johanen’s parable with which I began. ‘The Appointment in Samarra’ comes at the end of Maugham’s 1933 play ‘Sheppey’. It epitomises the blend of
humour, grace and resignation with which Tales of Kismet approach our
mortality. The eponymous Sheppey is a kind-hearted barber who wins the Irish
Lottery and gives all his money away over the course of the three acts. In the
final scene a woman enters who looks like Bessie Legros, a prostitute whom he
has helped, but really she is Death. She and Sheppey have a long conversation.
Towards the end Sheppey asks, ‘You ain’t come here on my account?’. ‘Yes,’ says
Death. ‘You’re joking,’ says Sheppey. ‘I thought you’d just come here to ‘ave a
little chat … I wish now I’d gone down to the Isle of Sheppey when the doctor
advised it. You wouldn’t ‘ave thought of looking for me there.’ And Death replies:
There was
a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions, and in
a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, ‘Master,
just now when I was in the market-place I was jostled by a woman in the crowd,
and when I turned I saw it was Death who jostled me. She looked at me and made
a threatening gesture. Lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city
and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra, and there Death will not find me.’ The
merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs
in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant
went down into the market-place and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came
to me and said, ‘Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw
him this morning?’ ‘That was not a threatening gesture,’ I said, ‘it was only a
start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an
appointment with him tonight in Samarra.’
Picture credits:
The Angel of Death by Evelyn de Morgan, 1881, wikipedia
Moses in his basket [the Child Cast Adrift] by Charles Foste: public domain, via blog Under the Influence
The Murder of Laius by Oedipus by Joseph Blanc wikipedia
Joseph Recognised by his Brothers by Léon Pierre Urbain Bourgeois wikipedia
Pedlar of Swaffham Town Sign wikipedia
The Cranes of Ibycus by Heinrich Schwemminger wikimedia commons
The Princess Flies on Black Wings by Anne Anderson, The Mammoth Book of Wonders, author's possession
A Golden Thread [The Moirae] by John Melhuish Strudwick, wikipedia
The Norns by Arthur Rackham wikipedia
Odin and Fenriswolf, Freyr and Surt by Emil Doepler, 1905 wikipedia
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