Fate in Beowulf

One of your classmates wrote her blog about the role of fate ("wyrd" in Old English) in Beowulf, something we didn't look at very closely in class, so I wanted to share a bit of what I know. Fate, as Beowulf understood it, was different from our understanding of the word as meaning one's destiny or ending. Instead, its meaning was closer to "happening." Below, I've pasted in the definition and etymology of the word, along with a more academic discussion. If you have any thoughts or opinions, please leave comments!
 
From Wikipedia: 

The Old English term wyrd derives from a Common Germanic term *wurđíz. Wyrd has cognates in Old Saxon wurd, Old High German wurt, Old Norse urðr, Dutch worden (to become) and German werden. The Proto-Indo-European root is *wert- "to turn, rotate", in Common Germanic *wirþ- with a meaning "to come to pass, to become, to be due" (also in weorþ, the notion of "worth" both in the sense of "price, value, amount due" and "honour, dignity, due esteem").

Old English wyrd is a verbal noun formed from the verb weorþan, meaning "to come to pass, to become". The term developed into the modern English adjective weird. Adjectival use develops in the 15th century, in the sense "having the power to control fate", originally in the name of the Weird Sisters, i.e. the classical Fates, in the Elizabethan period detached from their classical background as fays, and most notably appearing as the Three Witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth. 

From the 14th century, to weird was also used as a verb in Scots, in the sense of "to preordain by decree of fate".

The modern spelling weird first appears in Scottish and Northern English dialects in the 16th century and is taken up in standard literary English from the 17th century. The regular modern English form would have been wird, from Early Modern English werd. The substitution of werd by weird in the northern dialects is "difficult to account for".^[1]

The now most common meaning of weird, "odd, strange", is first attested in 1815, originally with a connotation of the supernatural or portentuous (especially in the collocation weird and wonderful), but by the early 20th century increasingly applied to everyday situations.^[2]

From  Wyrd: The Role of Fate: 

“Wyrd is an Old English noun, a feminine one, from the verb weorthan "to become".  It is related to the Old Saxon wurd, Old High German wurt, Old Norse urür.  Wyrd is the ancestor of the more modern weird, which before it meant odd or unusual in the pejorative sense carried connotations of the supernatural, as in Shakespeare's weird sisters, the trio of witches in MacBeth. The original Wyrd Sisters were of course, the three Norns, the Norse Goddesses of destiny. 

Wyrd is Fate or Destiny, but not the "inexorable fate" of the ancient Greeks. "A happening, event, or occurrence", found deeper in the Oxford English Dictionary listing is closer to the way our Anglo-Saxon and Norse forbears considered this term. In other words, Wyrd is not an end-point, but something continually happening around us at all times. One of the phrases used to describe this difficult term is "that which happens". 

A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, compiled by J.R. Clark Hall (University of Toronto Press, fourth ed, 1996) lists variously "fate, chance, fortune, destiny, the Fates, Providence, event, phenomenon, transaction, fact, condition" depending on the literary reference of the Old English work that mentions wyrd. Note "transaction" and "condition", as they point to both the idea of active Fate and the environment in which life is played out.

Anglo-Saxon scholar Stephen Pollington describes it thus:

"...It is worth stressing that the modern notion of linear time was still something of a scientific abstraction among even the Christian Anglo-Saxons, whose attitudes to life and death seem to have been governed by the world-view of their heathen forbears. They believed that at a given time some men...were doomed to die - a reaction to the uncertainties of warfare and accidents not unlike that of many modern soldiers who have faith in the idea that "if it's got your name on it, there's nothing you can do"...Tied in with this idea is the concept of wyrd 'the course of events' which is the underlying structure of time; it is this pattern which the Anglo-Saxons tried to read in the world about them....As the Beowulf poet observed:

Wyrd often saves 
an undoomed hero as long as his courage is good

(lines 572-3)

The implication is that while a man's courage holds out, he has a hope of winning through since wyrd 'the way things happen' will often work to help such a man, as long as he is not doomed; conversely if a man is doomed then not even his courage can help him stand against 'the course of events'." (The English Warrior from Earliest Times to 1066, pp166-167)

If time is not considered or experienced in a linear fashion but instead regarded as an interconnected series of events, each affecting the other, 'that which happens' or wyrd becomes not a destination but a sign post, or even a crossroads. Just as the traveller affects the outcome of his journey by the path he chooses, so do we play an active role in facing what wyrd metes out to us. Wyrd can be "worked". What you do as an individual can bend or change wyrd. 

Consider Time not as a swiftly flowing river, constantly rushing us father away from our births to our deaths, but instead as a lake or pool of infinite size. A handful of pebbles tossed unto the surface of a still pool creates simultaneous, rippling impressions on the water that spreading, touch each other and overlap. Each pebble is distinct from the other. They may be larger or smaller and create a splash of greater or lesser size, but the path of each creates an impression on the watery impression of every other pebble. These pebbles represent wyrd, but ours are the hands that cast them.

Even when a man was doomed by wyrd, there were always consolations, even if it was simply accepting an unpleasant fate with courage. The last line of the poem known as Resignation, a meditation on the Day of Judgment, sums this up well:

It is still the best thing, since a man may not himself avert his destiny, that he should therefore suffer it well. (translated by S.A.J. Bradley in Anglo-Saxon Poetry, David Campbell Publishers, 1982) 

This is from The Exeter Book, written c 950 to 1000 CE, and though strongly Christian in nature reflects the importance of Fate in human striving.”