Macbeth’s Three Witches; a reocurring motif in legend and literature
I think most people associate the three witches with the play Macbeth (1605), by William Shakespeare, where they are used as a device to provide supernatural endorsement for Macbeth’s claim to the throne. Then again, that isn’t where we first find them as the regular age range of UK theatre audiences runs between 25–44, majority skewed to female, so you could generalise that younger people don’t watch plays unless they have to and men hardly watch plays at all. Therefore, someone’s first awareness of the three witches symbolism might be from more accessible television parodies of Shakespeare such as in Blackadder — The Foretelling (Episode I, 1983; when they announce to the wrong character that he will be king, also in the wrong country), in a Doctor Who episode e.g. The Shakespeare Code (2007; when the witches are revealed to be aliens; one of many episodes that introduce Shakespeare to children) or in a novel you have to love: Wyrd Sisters. The full list would be exhaustive.
As the cauldron bubbled an eldritch voice shrieked: ‘When shall we three meet again?’ There was a pause. Finally another voice said, in far more ordinary tones: “Well, I can do next Tuesday.” — Wyrd Sisters (1988), by Terry Pratchett.
This essay has only happened because schools have been set Macbeth in the GCSE syllabus this year and someone mentioned “Shakespeare’s three witches”, which I instinctively drew a breath at. I mean, were they Shakespeare’s invention? I was pretty confident he didn’t come up with this idea himself but at the same time couldn’t think of any contrary information about who did. So I studied… but not for long. As it turned out, a very thorough literary researcher called Brian Branston had already done most of my work for me back in 1957. I have made a reasonable effort to contact him before composing a summary of the fascinating cultural trail of the three witches but I sense he might have gone ex-libris as he was working a very long time ago.
We are a story-telling species and we don’t like to waste good material, even if it was composed about redundant gods. We especially like to keep stories if they transcend entertainment to teach some sort of moral lesson. Therefore, in cases where the supernatural pantheon is replaced in any region of the world, many of the old stories become re-assigned to more relevant topical characters. Tales from the ancient Egyptian Book of Thoth including the Flood were later attributed to the Greek god Hermes or Jehovah and stories supposedly about Tiw from Anglo Saxon England appeared long before in Icelandic sources in the tales of the Sky Father (Odin).
Of course, of you are going to borrow the personae previously associated with a rival religion’s gods (hypothesising that witches were previously the Norns, under Odin), you have to take those symbols in such a way as to demonise the earlier theology as wrong. For instance, Lady Stenton writes of the Rockingham Forest hunt in 1255 (which recorded a pre-Christian ceremony at twilight involving a horse’s head) that the number of witches in a coven is always 13 — which is the same as the number of Old Norse gods, the theological system the witch concept arrived in England from. The count of 3 per coven, which was the legacy figure, soon became the dominant symbolism again because it had been embedded deeper than the Christian cultural appropriators could have known.
The old tales have been repeated so often that they’ve stuck in folklore memories as a kind of shorthand that we all recognise even before hearing the full story. There are always 3 princes, never more or fewer; the old man living in the mountain is wise; the old woman living alone in the woods brews and is evil; the wood chopper is honest and true; the kid from the farm has secret parentage and hidden powers; the waif locked in the tower by controlling parents will always be rescued; million to one shots happen nine times out of ten; the underdogs suffer then triumph; and the lead boy and the lead girl must always be married at the end. This is what Terry Pratchett called ‘The narrative imperative’, aspects where the storyteller has no choice but to conform because the reader wants the story to go the way they feel comforted and nostalgic from already knowing it goes. If an author breaks this convention and the lead boy and girl do not pair together, as in Harry Potter, the audience leave unsatisfied and the writer eventually concedes they have made a mistake. In one of the superficial Alien vs Predator films, the girlfriend of the hero is unexpectedly killed half way through the story, which contradicts the narrative imperative rule that she must be saved, and that probably explains why critics and audiences didn’t like it much. Authors are up against a natural force of expectation with this issue, stopping them from presenting something new. People say they want to read or see an original ending (voiced from the conscious mind) but the truth is they really do not like a change to the traditional formula (from the unconscious mind).
Now think about comments referring to images in stories. “It’s easier to get a sword out of a stone” — when it must come out of the stone and fulfil its purpose, or it wouldn’t be there. Originally this was because we had a verbal and memorised storytelling process, so elements essential to the story had to be remembered if you wanted the story to work and elements which were not essential would in some eventual iteration be forgotten as the story held up anyway. When stories were written down, this old process of paring down to essentials was presented as if it were a new idea: Chekov’s guns. One of the great contributors to the subconscious resource of cultural memory, both memorised and written, was William Shakespeare. There’s an oft-told anecdote about a lady visiting the theatre who was asked if she had enjoyed Hamlet, to which she replied “Sure, I guess, but it was so full of clichés”. What this really tells us is that the play has become a shared resource that we draw from and refer to in snippets in the confidence that it triggers a meaning already implanted in the person you are talking to.
King Alfred the Great wrote in De Consolatione Philosophiae (888 AD) that “what we call wyrd is really the work of god that He is busy with each day”. Yet, pre-Christian in mythology, the wyrd of fate is one of three sisters. Alternatively, is it the same entity appearing in three forms; past, present and future? If so, that’s rather familiar from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (1843) as the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future. In both cases, you cannot alter the past (that face is set) but your actions in the present can influence the future.
A modern vision (slightly sarcastic) of the triumvirate occupying the same role could be boyfriends past, current and future, a row of unageing faces. The first aspect (past) is unalterable and cannot be deleted*, unlike boyfriend present and boyfriend or husband future (a transition or potential outcome under your control, to exist only if you choose to take certain actions that make it happen). This ability for the observer to take an action to interfere with their own fate is like superposition in the quantum world, where the act of observing is an interference that makes uncertainty collapse into one or other position (outcome). Did people once believe that fate could be influenced to a more favourable end simply by acknowledging it? Sometimes interfering or travelling out of one’s way to prevent a prophecy is the very action which causes it to happen (see Oedipus in the aspect of killing his father, sleeping with his mother and feeling mortified about it, while the gods had a good laugh).
*I have to drop a quick quirky anecdote in here because no one is reading this anyway. This essay is like… do you remember Sherlock Holmes’ blog which enumerates 243 types of cigarette ash? Ok, well, a lot of people assume that if someone has Shakespearean knowledge (gets the references), they therefore had a high quality education and it follows that the individual will behave well, know right from wrong and be trustworthy. This is why people never admit they haven’t read or watched famous Shakespeare plays. I just want to shoe-horn in here that Shakespearean knowledge being a guideline to civilised behaviour is not a reliable assumption, in my experience. Case study 1: Some people wield such a persuasive skill at spinning allusions that you find you’re going along with their every word, as your brain cycles down and abandons critical resistance. A classic example comes from a certain early career male lecturer at a university I shall call ‘R’ who was kind enough to read and critique a nameless female undergraduate’s dissertation. Although it is set in stone somewhere that staff have a strict code of conduct about expectations of propriety and decorum interacting with students registered at their own university, the boundary of regulation was never designed to regulate external contacts, which would be reaching too far into the private lives of employees. “All men’s faces are true, whatsome’er their hands are [doing]”. Shakespeare. This particular student honestly had too much to deal with at that point in their life but needed reassurance that their work was the best it could be before submitting, so secured a meeting and took the train. Impressive. Here was a man who knew Shakespeare and every cliche therein like the back of his hand. He got the Desdemona joke first time. Amongst the recommendations she couldn’t keep up with were to cite passages from Hardy, Goethe, Virgil and his own work, in ascending order of importance, then he suggested quite casually that what he would like to do next didn’t really count as sex. Hmm. Witchcraft, methinks, seems nothing beyond the simple combination of words, confidence and theatre. Imagine what a success he might have been talking people down from tall buildings. There is a karmic counterpoint to this event, a face in the line of boyfriends past which my colleague would prefer deleted, because the lecturer’s own fiancée, who is I think about 23 (and almost on friendly terms with my colleague), was at the time desperately keen on making a baby. News of intrigue has reached me since that she hadn’t been bothering him with her problem. Such a busy couple and, it’s true, some people really do deserve each other.
Where was I? Fate in Anglo Saxon times was called Wyrd (from which we derive the word weird) and this is mentioned in The Dream of the Rood (1000 AD). It was wyrd that not only drove destiny but decided the lengths of human lives. Although wyrd (fate) is an abstract concept, it took a human form (anthropomorphic) as an elderly female weaver, one of three ‘fatal sisters’, working on a cloth — originally called a web, through which a tapestry of lives ran. When we run into lines which appear to make no sense, like “the Lord gave the people of the Weders webs to speed them in their battles”, learning some of the context of their thinking can sometimes provide clues to reach interpretations such as, here, a deity nudged a fatal sister to extend the lives of the warriors of one side in a battle. No one ever said that gods were unbiassed.
In Old English, the phrase ‘me that wyrd gewaef’ means ‘fate wove me to that destiny’. Sweet’s Anglo Saxon Primer and other sources present similar words: gewaef (wove) and gewif (fortune, destiny), indicating the concepts led to the words which were then conflated, rather than an existing word was found to describe the concept (indicative of ancient or pre-dialect personifications).
In the old world, even the gods (of many regions of the world) were subject to Fate, sometimes a goddess embodying the concept — and in some Fate pre-existed the gods. In the process of Christianisation, including in England, that idea had to go because the new religion described only 1 deity who was there at the beginning and all else followed after. The Church’s 300 year monopoly on the ‘purification’ of literature ensured (1300 to 1577 AD) that the motif was very rarely mentioned, except 1 instance below, and ‘Wyrd’ was a word that was suppressed from books — i.e. no fate, just God’s ineffable determination. Wyrd was classified as a heathen goddess and the ‘fatal sisters’ as demonic.
In The Court of Love (1450) the witches of destiny appear again with the words: “I mene the three of fatal destine, that be our Werdes”, a rare mention of this symbolism in that century. Then on to Elizabethan England and immortalisation of the 3 by Shakespeare.
So we have:
6000 BC to 1000 BC, prehistoric to Hellenistic Greece, 3 sisters collectively called the Moirai (Clotho [who spun], Lachesis [allotter, measurer], Atropos [death]), daughters of Nyx — the Night (but becoming in the Hellenistic period daughters of Ananke, representing necessity), living in a cave by a pool, who were spinners/weavers of fate’s cloth, controlling human lives and issuing prophecies.
400 BC to ?, Roman, 3 sisters collectively called the Parcae (Nona [spinner of a person’s life thread on the day they got their name {see inscription: Neuna fata, Neuna dono, Parca Maurtia dono}], Decima/Decuma [who measured it] and Morta [who cut it]), also called Parca (Destiny) when all 3 manifest as 1 goddess, who were spinners/weavers of fate’s cloth, controlling human lives and issuing prophecies. It was occasionally said (Ovid?) that the Parcae were left-handed. The Latin word for left-handed is sinister, which may be why even today the word sinister (nominal meaning: left) also carries the secondary meaning: creepy and threatening.
725 AD, the term Wyrd (fate) appears in Corpus Gloss, by Hessels.
870 to 889 AD, in Boethius, written by King Alfred of Wessex (England), Wyrd fell down in subjugation to the Christian god, which indicates that the Anglo-Saxons believed that the supernatural entity existed in their world… but that it was deposed. In De Consolatione Philosophiae (888 AD), by King Alfred, he rationalises Wyrd as just God’s other work.
1000 AD, England, The Dream of the Rood presents wyrd as normalised. 1066 AD, influences in ‘The Witch Wives’ of Harald Hardradi (Hardrada)’s saga, where the ‘Waelcyrge’ or ‘Erinyes’ (similar to the Greek Furies) “were old, older than the gods who came to power with Zeus; their skins black, their garnets grey; they were three in number but could be invoked together as a single being, an Erinyes; their voice was often like the lowing of cattle but usually their approach was heralded by a babble of barking. Their home was below the earth in the underworld” (Branston).
Since before 1100 AD then on to 1300 AD north UK, 1350 AD in Scandinavia and later in Iceland, Old Norse, 3 sisters collectively called the Nornir or Norns (Urdr/Uror/ aka Wyrd [spinner], Verdandi [possibly aka Weorthend], Skuld), living in a cave by a pool, who were spinners/weavers of fate’s cloth, lived in a cave by a well and a tree, controlling human lives and issuing prophecies. They also protected the roots of Yggdrasil, the tree of life spanning the worlds. Note that the Nornir were believed to be in existence before the gods.
1000 to 1300 AD, Ancient to Norman English cross-over, 3 sisters collectively called Wyrd (possibly one named Metod [lit. ‘Measurer’, the origin of ‘to mete out a fate’ — see ‘Metan’ on pg. 165 of Bosworth’s Anglo-Saxon and English Dictionary]), who “sparred” amongst themselves (squabbled), were spinners of cloth and linked to human fate. Their language sounded like barking dogs.
1300 to 1600, in Iceland, stories were still recorded of 3 fatal sisters. Several Icelandic words by this time had dropped their initial letter W and the first sister’s name warped from Wurdr to Urdr. Her name still existed as Wurd in pronounced Alglo-Saxon and as Wurt in High Germanic. Icelandic literature records the 3 sisters’ names as Urdr, Verdani and Skuld (also shorthand for past, present and future) and they retained the collective name Nornir (the Norns of the Sagas in Scandinavian mythology, later used in Teutonic myth and legend, then later still reworked in Wagner’s Ring Cycle, which directly inspired Tolkien but he did not incorporate Norn symbolism directly into his work). The Norn 3 sisters resided under the World Ask Tree in Teutonic legend, from which Siegfried the Dragon Slayer’s spear was cut.
Ca. 1300 AD, European Christian, 3 sisters (Allecto, Tesiphone and Megera, collectively demonised as demons of the afterlife [Ars Laureeshamensis, Expositio in Donatum Maiorem III De Tropis pg. 243] as “they live in hell and spare no one”, losing divine status due to Christian monotheism, see Burkhard of Halberstadt’s decrees 1007–1014 AD stigmatising them, e.g. “womb incantation” [still birth], see also Guiseppi Veltri’s A Mirror of Rabbinic Hermeneutics for interpretation), interfering to blight people’s lives.
1300 to 1577 AD, very little mention of the sisters or wyrd in literature except for Court of Love (1450 AD, as above) and then in Legend of Good Women, by Chaucer (Hypermenestra 19, publ. 1385 AD), with other short passages in Gower and Langland. This suggested that 3 witches mythology survived in oral tradition only because the Church controlled written records and wished to obliterate pagan heritage.
1577 AD, England and Scotland, Holingshed (pg. 243) depicts the 3 ‘Wyrd’ sisters living by a tree (placed in the centre-ground), meeting Makbeth (Macbeth) and Banquho (Banquo) to give a greeting in 3 parts representing past, present and future, with future being the prophetic element: “All haile Makbeth, Thane of Cawder!” (past news, a title held previously); “All haile Makbeth, Thane of Glammis!” (present, a title to which Macbeth was now entitled upon the topical death of his father Sinnel [the spelling in Holinshed; otherwise more correctly recorded to be Finnel or Findlaech of Moray], then “All haile Makbeth, King of Scotland!” (future prophecy).
1605 AD, England, Macbeth (Shakespeare) draws upon Holingshed’s work but instead places the 3 “Weird Sisters” on a blasted heath instead of a grassy plain. They are interested in battles as instruments of fate (“when the hurlyburly’s done, when the battle’s lost or won”) where they meet Macbeth and Banquo with a 3 part greeting and a prophecy that Macbeth will be King of Scotland. These witches control men’s fates and live in a cavern with a cauldron. This version are “midnight hags” (still daughters of Night?), “creatures of the elder world” (slurs conforming with the post-Christian stigma) and “Goddesses of destine” (an heretic pre-Christian or relict belief).
1900 AD to present, the 3 sisters as witches bearing prophecies are used in light entertainment.
As a pointless footnote on the “Thane of Glammis”, modern spelling Glamis, the occupant of Glamis Castle a few decades ago was Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. I had a conversation with a man who had worked on her estate maintenance staff at the time and he related that she liked to dig the roses with a silver Speak & Jackson Ltd garden fork. The fork was made of a metal so soft and malleable that the fork tines or prongs would bend backwards if anyone put proper leverage into it, so this created the situation that this illustrious member of the Royal family could only dig in soil that had previously been dug by someone else. Perhaps that’s why the Queen Mother, Laird of Glamis, lived to an age of 101 (1900–2002) and Macbeth, Thane of Glamis, died in a battle at half that span (1005–1057).
In summary, Shakespeare didn’t invent the 3 witches of Macbeth. Here we have a set of goddesses who have been in international human consciousness for 8,000 years (since at least 6000 BC). They have moved across national boundaries, been reincorporated into several religions, been stigmatised, used as literary devices for storytelling and yet they have retained most of their original key attributes. They gave us the word weird and may be the cause of the secondary meaning of the word sinister. Feel free to cut and paste this into your GCSE essays because Bran Branston has vanished into history and I’m too tired to mind and going to back to my cave for the rest of winter.
