The Voluspa, the Poetic Edda's great prophetic poem, personifies this fate laying force as the Norns, dwelling by a well at the roots of Yggdrasil, the world tree, and names three of them, Urd, Verdandi and Skuld, in a sequence scholars have long read as tracking something like past, present and an uncertain future, though the precise sense of Skuld, related to a word for debt or obligation, has generated ongoing philological discussion about whether it denotes futurity as strictly as the other two names denote past and present. Other sources describe norns in the plural well beyond just these three, some benevolent and some harsh, attending every birth to set that individual's share of orlog, which suggests a broader class of fate related beings rather than a single fixed trio in wider Norse belief, even where the Voluspa's three named figures became the most literarily prominent.
Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda develops the image further, describing the Norns watering Yggdrasil's roots to keep the tree alive, binding the maintenance of the entire cosmos to the same fate laying function that determines any single person's orlog, a structural link between individual destiny and cosmic order that runs through Norse mythological thought more broadly.