Dear Bernard Cornwell, This may be a bit esoteric for the Your Questions bulletin board, but I thought you might be interested. Thank you for your generous reply to my question about the Three Fates in Greek and Norse myth and religion. I have had a quick look on Wikipedia and found an interesting article with a number of references which I hope to follow up. I see what you mean about Gravess White Goddess but will try to get hold of a copy, anyway. The Wikipedia article included the following. *The term Triple Goddess was popularised by poet and scholar Robert Graves who noted that an archetypal goddess triad occurred throughout Indo-European mythology. He was not the originator of this concept, and it appears as a recurrent theme in the Myth and Ritual school of classical archaeology at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. *Another cross-cultural archetype is the three goddesses of fate. In Greek Mythology there are the Moirae; in Norse mythology there are the Norns. The Weird Sisters of Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Wyrd Sisters of Terry Pratchett’s novel of the same name are most definitely inspired by these deities.* My initial thinking is that the transmission of the Indo-European Fates triad may have happened at the same time as the transmission and development of Indo-European languages during the pre-historic migrations throughout Europe. Perhaps some proto-myth of three women spinning our fates existed and moved with the migrating peoples, changing as it went. I hope to follow this up. Would you be interested in hearing any results of my search? If this was the case, it would overcome the difficulty of geographic distance between Greece and the Nordic countries. That is, the transmission occurred over a long period of time, rather than being the result of immediate contact by, for example, missionaries or traders. However, that said, the Norse people did get at least as far as far as Istanbul, or, as it was then, Byzantium or possibly Constantinople, by sailing down the Danube to the Black Sea. (The portage around the rapids and gorges must have been a challenge!) The guards of the Byzantine emperor were at one time former Vikings, though I am not sure how long they had been there. One of the lions outside the Arsenale in Venice, which were stolen from Constantinople in the so-called fourth crusade in the 14th century, in reality, the sack of the city, has Viking runes scratched into its marble flank, no doubt by a rather bored guard. Or so I understand. Elizabeth Smith