One concept above all was central to the gods’ relationship with the human world and intersected with the lives of its other, supernatural inhabitants: the idea of fate. Governing beings of every kind—mortal and divine, living and dead—was the preordination of the future; it lay at the heart of the Norse mind-set. For the Viking-Age Scandinavians, fate did not represent the absence of choice but rather the manifestation of a pre-existing truth. Free will existed, but exercising it inevitably led to becoming the person you always, really, had been.
