wyrd — from Proto-Germanic wurdiz, from werþaną (to become, to turn).
At the root: PIE *wert- — to turn, to wind, to weave.
The same root that gives us vortex, verse, worth, and wrist.
The Norns sit at the well of Urðr — Urðr (what was), Verðandi (what is becoming), Skuld (what shall be) — weaving fate as thread.
Not fate as destination. Fate as texture. The grain of the wood.
dán — Irish. Fate. Also: poem. Also: gift.
Three meanings, one word.
The site mark is a triple spiral. The form appears in Irish megalithic stone going back five thousand years — carved at Newgrange, where the winter solstice sun reaches it once a year, for seventeen minutes.
Three arms. Three turns each. One centre.
What it meant to the people who carved it: unknown. What it suggests: turning, returning, the thing that keeps going.
The glyph beside dán on the home page is Nion — the Ogham letter N. Ogham is the earliest written form of Irish, scratched into stone from the fourth century onward.
Nion's tree is the ash. Nin in Old Irish.
Yggdrasil — the World Tree of Norse cosmology, the axis of all nine realms — is an ash tree. The Norns sit at its roots.
So the letter in front of fate-poem-gift is the letter for the tree beneath which fate is woven.
It got there by accident. Most things do.
Crann bile — sacred tree. A tree marked as belonging to a place, a people, a lineage.
Ireland had five of them. Not five species. Five individual trees, named.
Three were ash.
The ash as vertical thing. Axis. The spine that holds the worlds in relation.
An ash tree at the centre of nine Norse realms. Ash trees at the seat of every Irish king. Nion — the Ogham letter for ash — opens this site's subtitle.
Cill Bhríde — the church of Brigid. The sacred grove that survived long enough to become a churchyard.
Sometimes the old things don't disappear. They get a new name.
The Ogham alphabet is named for trees. Each letter is a species. To write in Ogham is to write in the language of the forest.
The earliest Irish writing is a catalogue of trees.