Samuel John Egbert Jones, c.1825, Macbeth and Banquo encounter the three weird sisters in Act 1, Scene 3 of Shakespeare’s Macbeth
30 September 2024
Weird, as we most often use it today, is an adjective meaning strange, odd, or uncanny. But that’s a relatively new sense, only arising in the last two hundred years or so; the word, with a different meaning, is over a thousand years old.
In Old English, the version of the English spoken until the Norman Conquest in 1066, wyrd meant fate or destiny. It appears in Beowulf multiple times; one such is in this passage where Hrothgar speaks to Beowulf about the predations of the monster Grendel:
Sorh is me to secganne on sefan minum
gumena ængum hwæt me Grendel hafað
hynðo on Heorote mid his heteþancum,
færniða gefremed; is min fletwerod,
wigheap gewanod; hie wyrd forsweop
on Grendles gryre.
(It is a sorrow in my heart for me to tell any man what humiliations Grendel has done to me in Heorot, with his hostile thoughts, his sudden attacks. My hall-band, my battle-host is decimated. Weird swept them into Grendel’s dreadful onslaughts.)
This sense of fate or destiny remained in use through the Middle English period, but then faded from use except in Scottish and northern English dialects. If one encounters this sense today, it is almost always in deliberately archaic language or in Scottish literary texts.
In Old English, wyrd could also be used to refer to the Fates of Greek and Roman myth, the three women who spun and cut the threads of destiny for all humans. This sense appears in a Latin–English glossary from the eighth century (Hessels), where the Latin Parcae (the Fates) is glossed as wyrde.
This association of weird with the Fates of myth continued through the Middle English period. Chaucer used the word in this sense. From the “Legend of Hypermnestra” in his Legend of Good Women, c.1386:
The Wirdes, that we clepen Destine,
Hath shapen hire that she mot nedes be
Pyëtous, sad, wis, and trewe as stel,
As to those wemen it acordeth wel.
(The Weirds, that we call Destiny,
Had shaped her that she must needs be
Compassionate, sad, wise, and true as steel,
And this woman it fitted well.)
And the Catholicon Anglicum, an English-Latin dictionary written some time before 1500, uses the phrase Wyrde systres (weird sisters) to gloss Parcae.
But the phrase weird sisters would be immortalized by Shakespeare’s 1606 play Macbeth, when the playwright uses the phrase to refer to the three witches who prophesize about Macbeth’s fate:
The weyward Sisters, hand in hand,
Posters of the Sea and Land,
Thus doe goe, about, about,
Thrice to thine, and thrice to mine,
And thrice againe, to make vp nine.
Peace, the Charme’s wound vp.
Shakespeare undoubtedly intended weyward to evoke the sense of the Fates of ancient myth, after all, there are three of them and they do know Macbeth’s fate. But when Shakespeare penned this, the association of weird with the Fates was falling out of use. The spelling weyward here is significant. It’s an unusual spelling of weird—it’s the only example of this spelling in the Oxford English Dictionary. And one would expect it to represent the present-day word wayward, for which the OED has several examples from this period and earlier, rather than weird.
Holinshed’s Chronicles, which was one of Shakespeare’s sources for the Macbeth story, refers to them as weird sisters:
But afterwards, the common opinion was that these women were eyther the weird sisters, that is (as ye would ye Goddesses of destinie, or els some Nimphes or Feiries, endowed with knowledge or prophesie by their Necromanticall science, bicause every thing came to passe as they had spoken.
Shakespeare—or the compilers of the posthumous First Folio in which the play appears—changed weird to weyward, which the OED defines as “disposed to go against the wishes or advice of other or what is proper or reasonable.” I see three possibilities here. The first is that Shakespeare deliberately intended to conflate weird and wayward, associating the three women with the classical Fates and at the same time marking them as out of the ordinary, as strange. The other is that Shakespeare deviated from Holinshed and intended just the wayward sense. The final possibility is that Shakespeare originally wrote weird, but the compilers of the First Folio, perhaps not consulting Holinshed, emended Shakespeare’s text from the obsolescent weird to the then more current weyward.
Regardless of how the change came about, beginning in the eighteenth century editors of editions of Shakespeare’s texts almost universally emended the text to read weird sisters, as it was spelled in Holinshed, and the spooky and uncanny nature of the witches became the dominant association with the word.
We see the modern strange or uncanny sense of weird in other texts by the early nineteenth century. Here is an example from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1816 poem Alastor: or, the Spirit of Solitude:
In lone and silent hours,
When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness,
Like an inspired and desperate alchymist
Staking his very life on some dark hope,
Have I mixed awful talk and asking looks
With my most innocent love, until strange tears
United with those breathless kisses, made
Such magic as compels the charmed night
To render up thy charge.
And later in the same poem,
Like clouds suspended in an emerald sky,
The ash and the acacia floating hang
Tremulous and pale. Like restless serpents, clothed
In rainbow and in fire, the parasites,
Starred with ten thousand blossoms, flow around
The gray trunks, and, as gamesome infants' eyes.
With gentle meanings, and most innocent wiles.
Fold their beams round the hearts of those that love.
These twine their tendrils with the wedded boughs
Uniting their close union; the woven leaves
Make net-work of the dark blue light of day.
And the night's noontide clearness, mutable
As shapes in the weird clouds.
That’s how weird moved from meaning fate or destiny to referring to things that were odd or out of the ordinary.
Sources:
Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Legend of Good Women: The Legend of Hypermnestra.” The Riverside Chaucer, third edition. Larry D. Benson, ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987, 628, lines 2579–83.
de Grazia, Margreta and Peter Stallybrass. “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text.” Shakespeare Quarterly, 44.3, Autumn 1993. 255–83 at 263–64. JSTOR.
Fulk, R.D., Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles, eds. Klaeber’s Beowulf, fourth edition. Toronto: U of Toronto Press, 2008, 473–78a.
Herrtage, Sidney J.H., ed. Catholicon Anglicum, an English-Latin Wordbook (1881). Early English Text Society, O.S. 75. Millwood, New York: Kraus Reprint, 1987, 420. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Hessels, J.H. An Eighth-Century Latin–Anglo-Saxon Glossary. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1890, 87. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 144.
Holinshed, Raphael. “The Historie of Scotland.” In The First Volume of the Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande. London: John Harrison, 1577, 243–44. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019. s.v., werd, n.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. weird, n., weird, adj. weird, v.; third edition, December 2015, s.v. wayward, adj. & n.
Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. First Folio. London: Isaac Jaggard and Ed. Blount, 1623. 1.3, 132.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “Alastor.” Alastor: or, the Spirit of Solitude: and Other Poems. London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1816, 3, 30–31. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Thompson, Ayanna. “What Is a ‘Weyward’ Macbeth?” In Scott L. Newstok and Ayanna Thompson, eds. Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, 3–10 at 3.
Image credit: Samuel John Egbert Jones, c.1825, oil on canvas. Royal Shakespeare Company Collection. Public domain image.