The Moirae

Methodology

We sifted through a few articles about the Norns, the Moirae (a.k.a the Greek Fates), and Shai, god of fate, in Egyptian mythology. A very useful book found on the nornir was titled The Norns in Old Norse Mythology by Karen Bek-Pedersen. The author did an in-depth study on the Norns and their place in myths. She even pulled poems from the Poetic Edda, an anonymous collection of poetry from that time period. The author analyzed them, focusing primarily on tone and meaning. We also found a lecture from the University of Western Georgia that discusses fate specifically in the Greek time period and its correlation with philosophy. We interviewed one of the Greek Mythology professors here at Western, Miller Krause, and he told us about several myths concerning the Moirae. A couple to note were the stories of Admetus and Meleager. Admetus was a friend of Apollo’s (god of the sun). He was fated to die early, so Apollo got the Moirae drunk and tricked them into thinking they had already killed him. Meleager was a famous Greek hero who was fated to die once a branded log had finished burning. His mother tried to save him from it by hiding the log, but he went insane and burned it anyways, killing him as soon as it was done. For more information about the Greek Fates, we turned to articles about them, where we gained more information about who they were and why the Greeks worshipped them. We read several articles about the Egyptian god, Shai. In these, we found out a lot about who Shai was and gained insight as to why the Egyptians worshipped him. We dug deep into each of the cultures mentioned and their histories, making note of how stories were told during those times and their values/religions. We came together and compared and contrasted the representation of fate in those mythologies, and made our analyses from there.