With reservations, this book, which is really a long philosophical essay divided into an Introduction and six chapters, may be recommended to anyone interested in Old Norse mythology. Although the author has little Old Icelandic, and the book shows startling gaps in reference to modern critical commentary, it has a lot to offer on the conceptual level. The discussion is learned and lucid. There is much subtlety of thought as well as an abiding good sense. There are also some intriguing comparative references to Middle Egyptian, Lithuanian and West African mythologies as well as to those nearer home. Despite the omissions noted above, it is no disadvantage that the author was trained in philosophy rather than in Old Icelandic literature or Germanic mythology or archaeology. While the occasional literary misjudgments are no doubt proof of some patchy assistance with Old Norse literature, the conceptualisations of the essay, written in the mercurial style of a philosophical discipline, act as a powerful stimulant to thought. Ambitiously enough, Winterbourne wishes to treat time and fate in the Eddas not as the constant louring background of all those stories we know and love, but as subjects for analysis in the wider search for an understanding of Germanic paganism, effectively the mentality of pre-Christian north-western Europe over more than a thousand years.
The author discusses 'Germanic' time and fate as they appear in the Old Norse and other mythologies of the world with the aim of severing, or at least loosening, a connection between these two entities that most of us probably take for granted. I think he succeeds in this aim. He shows that the mythic time-fate problem is more complex than it seems, as a 'three-body' problem of casuality, fate and time in which no satisfactory theory of a relationship between all three has yet emerged. Winterbourne laudably sets out to remove the need for one.
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