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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Strangely enough the word “weird “has come into modern English entirely from its use in Macbeth. The word occurs six times in this play as usually printed: five times in the expression “weird sisters” (I, III, 32, and V, 8; II, I, 20; III, IV, 133; IV, I, 136), and once in the phrase “the weird women “(III, I, 2). Stranger still, “weird “does not appear at all in the only authoritative text of the tragedy, that of the first folio. In that edition the word is “weyward” in the first three passages in the play, and “weyard” in the last three. It was Theobald, the “dearest foe” of Pope, who saw that Shakespeare must have written “weird,” and that this rare word had been changed because of “the ignorance of the copyists.” Modern editors accept the suggestion of Theobald; but I believe that the full force of the word “weird “is often unapprehended. even by special students of the play.
1 Some other topics connected with this play were treated by the writer in the Atlantic Monthly for February, 1892, in a paper entitled “Studies in Macbeth.”
1 Paul's Grundriss der germ. Philologie, I, 1024.
1 Anderson's Norse Mythology, p. 209.
2 Dr. F. A. Wood, of the University of Chicago, thinks that the writer in the Century Dictionary does not catch the exact force of the word “weird.” “In origin,” writes Dr. Wood, “it is a feminine abstract noun. It seems better, therefore, to regard ‘weird,’ in the compound ‘weird-sisters’, as the abstract ‘fate,’ rather than as the goddess of fate, one of the Parcae. The ‘weird-sisters’ would then mean the ‘fate-sisters’ or ‘death-sisters’ (cf. Chaucer's expression, ‘O fatal sustren.’—Troilus and Cr., III, 733). This, I think, is the way Grimm regarded it in his Deutsche Mythologie, I, 337 ff., where similar compounds are given, ‘the thre weirdsystirs’ [from The Complaynt of Scotland, written 1548], ‘the weirdelves’ [from Warner's Albion's England, printed 1616], etc.
If we make ‘weird’ in this compound the goddess, then the compound would mean ‘the sisters of Wyrd,’ and not‘the sister Wyrds.’”
3 While reading the proof of this paper, I have noticed the following sentence in Dowden's Shakspere—His Mind and Art, p. 222:—” When they have given him the three hails—as Glamis, as Cawdor, and as King; the hail of the past, of the present, of the future—Macbeth starts.”
1 Isaac Taylor, Words and Places, p. 112.
1 Essays in American History, p. 61.
2 Spectator Essays, No. 117.
3 In the notes to his edition of the De Coverley Essays (Harper).
1 Die Technik des Dramas, p. 52.
2 See Furness’Macbeth, pp. 356-9.
1 Vol. V, p. 264.
2 Arden Macbeth, p. 169.