Fate

[leo9]

'Karma': "In theistic schools of Hinduism, humans have free will to choose good or evil and suffer the consequences, which require the will of God to implement karma's consequences, unlike Buddhism or Jainism which do not accord any role to a supreme God or gods. In Eastern beliefs, the karmic effects of all deeds are viewed as actively shaping past, present, and future experiences." (Wikepedia)

So karma means free will, but what you do shapes what happens next, with or without a god involved.

Or as Thorne says, free will with consequences. The only argument is over how the consequences operate, and whether, say, harm done to others will do you harm in the end even if no human justice can reach you.

'Wyrd': "is a concept in Anglo-Saxon culture roughly corresponding to fate or personal destiny".

An finally an extract from an article on 'wyrd':
For example, say I happen to find myself in a situation where someone insults me. I can "freely" choose any one of a number of immediate reactions, from ignoring the person to slapping her. But my choice at that moment is obviously going to be constrained by a number of patterns of wyrd already in place, including my inborn personality characteristics, my social conditioning, my past experiences with being insulted, my relationship with the person who has insulted me, even my hormone levels.

To the extent that my reaction is determined by these patterns, wyrd is shaping my life at that moment, and my reaction may feel to me as though it were predestined (if I want to deny responsibility) or the only "right" choice (if I want to claim responsibility for it). To the extent that I am aware of certain recurring patterns in my life, I might feel as though the person was fated to insult me at that moment. But no matter which way I chose to react to the insult, my reaction will add to the patterns in place and constrain my future actions (if I'm insulted a second time, my reaction will be determined in part by how I behaved when I was insulted the first time.) So, at the same time I am caught up in experiencing certain patterns of wyrd, I am creating them.

Moving from the personal to the universal, my reaction will also add to the patterns affecting the behaviour of the person who insulted me. As a result of my response, she may change her behaviour towards others which will, in turn, change her personal ørlög, and so on. Ultimately, each little choice we make affects universal forces which can come back to affect us in weird ways. The larger patterns of wyrd created by individuals in a particular time and place is the source of the zeitgeist (spirit of the age) which informs the beliefs and behaviour of everyone in a society. Thus, "that which has become", wyrd, both creates and is created by individual actions, states, and choices. "
(http://www.wyrdwords.vispa.com/heathenry/whatwyrd.html)

Thir forgot to make clear that this is a modern interpretation, which doesn't exactly fit what little we know of the ancients' beliefs. The clearest expression of the Nordic view of fate that has come down to us is the Völuspá, in which a seeress tells Odin how the world will end: the Volva tells him how he and many other Aesir will die, without any suggestion that they can avoid it. There are things that mortals can do to put off the end - mostly trivial things like trimming corpses' fingernails - but we can only make it a bit later, it will come eventually.

It is to be assumed that this translates into the same view of individual destiny. If Wyrd (sometimes personified as one of the Norns, the spinners of men's lives) has decided that you are to be poor and enslaved, no amount of striving can lift you from the mud. On the other hand, if Wyrd has decided that a slave shall become a hero nothing can stand in his way, so since we none of us know what our fates are, it's worth trying!

But even when seen as an anthopomorphic personification, Wyrd is impersonal and unapprochable: nobody prays to her or hopes to change her mind, and even the Allfather accepts his fate as inevitable. Pray to the gods for help all you wish, but if Wyrd has ruled differently, all the gods can't change it. One consults seers, as Odin did, not to learn what to avoid, but what to accept.

Not, I may say, a view I share...