Hej Susan,

>Vala is a pebble or stone? How does that, if at all, relate to "vala" in

refering to a woman? Or to the little bone that is used for divination?

A "vala" is also clew for winding yarn. It is often made of a bone. Völur
(plural) are used in spinning. The same type of bone, chicken bone, is
also used for divination. Naturally, they came to be associated with the
norns, who weave the destinies of men.

>You're thinking of the word "völva" (prophetress); in Old Icelandic, that

word used to get confused with "vala" (pebble), because they have common
forms in declension.

See Fjolsvinnsmal 30 for a clever use of this type of confusion (Víðópnis
völum) concerning the golden cock perched on the \world-Tree. The stanza
speaks of a luminous scythe found among Vidofnir's feathers. Vidofnir, the
"wide open", perched atop the Tree, represents the open sky. The "luminous
sycthe" among his feathers is the crescent Moon. In Helgi Hundingbani 3-4
the Norns come "at night" and wind the fate of the young on the loom of the
nighttime sky, with the stars as their clews. (We've all heard of
"star-crossed" lovers as late as Shakespeare's day.) There they weave the
web "beneath the halls of the Moon." The "luminous scythe" found in the
Wide-open sky is the Moon, it alone can cut the örlog-threads.

To the Norns, the "völur" serve both as a weaving instrument and a tool of
fate. The "völur" are identical with the stars. The Norse Fates are seen as
giant women, weaving among the stars. The poet of Fjolsvinnsmal made use of
both senses of the word.

Wassail, William



"In a way, the Viking longboat was the Internet of the year 1000,
connecting people and places who themselves could not even imagine what lay
beyond that wide sea." Hillary Rodham Clinton