Keynote speakers

Łukasz Neubauer, Ph.D.

‘Thence Come The Three Maidens Knowing Much’: An Examination and Assessment of the Ancient Germanic Roots for William Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters

Originally performed in the first decade of the seventeenth century, Macbeth certainly ranks amongst the greatest Jacobean tragedies and is by far the darkest of all dramatic pieces penned by the bard from Stratford-upon-Avon. One of the most perplexing ingredients of this gory tale of regal lust, standing at the very centre of events, is the preaternatural trio of the Weird Sisters whose genuine involvement in the play’s dynamic chain of events has for years been the subject for many an academic and artistic discussion. There is no denying that the etymological and, to a large extent, cultural roots for the three lie in the early Germanic concept of fate-weaving maidens – sometimes known as nornir – who, according to the eddic poem Vǫluspá, may be found beneath the gigantic world tree Yggdrasill where they lǫg l[eggja], / [...] líf k[jósa] / alda bǫrnum, / [ok] ǫrlǫg seggja (20) ‘establish laws, choose lives of the sons of men and pronounce their fates’. It would be a gross misconception, however, to assume that Shakespeare, who in all likelihood took the idea for his ‘witches’ from the revised edition of Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (1587), was in any way aware of their actual Germanic inheritance. In fact, it appears that he might have been just as much (if not more) inclined to model them on the classical personifications of the Fate – the Greek Moirai or Roman Parcae. Nonetheless, despite these multiple layers of cultural influence, there is still remaining in his Weird Sisters a great deal of their original northern fabric. The foremost objectives of my paper are therefore to identify and examine some of the most striking aspects of this now largely obscure Germanic inheritance.

Grzegorz Trębicki, Ph.D.

'Problems of the non-mimetic fiction taxonomy'

TBA