The Norns

It is a mystery that in the Norse legends of Saint Ingrid, whom they called Valkyrie, Ingrid is said to have told her men that they were fighting three Norns, which she even called by name. Now, the Norse men who comprised her first fighting force would have known the word Norn as what we would call the Norse version of the Fates, unassailable forces of Nature if not beyond supernatural, forces that even gods and goddesses could not match. This does not seem at first glance to be a winning combination for keeping up morale.
However, as many of the ancient Norse and ancient Greek myths depended on a dramatically pre-Christian morality, it must be viewed in context that (according to the few pieces of surviving Norse poetry explaining their worldview), the men believed in "good" Norns and "bad" Norns. One such poem states with emphasis that there is a Norn for every human, one for every Elf, and one for every Dwarf. If you got a good Norn assigned to you at your birth, then you would have a long and easy life with much wealth dropping into your lap with the least effort on your part. If you got a bad Norn, things would go differently.
To this very day, the Norse have a saying: "You're nothing special," which tells even their ceremonial king that true honor and character come from within, and circumstances of your birth and family wealth are random happenstance to be accepted without pride nor guilt, that everyone, particularly all men, are created equal.
With that in mind, the idea of joining a strong leader fighting to change and defeat your fate seems "unimpossible", and perhaps an honorable and extremely challenging noble purpose. They likely would have seen it as taking control of their lives from a disreputable random crap-shoot and forging a fairer existence by choice of will. This could have been the seeds of the revolution of thinking changing from "You are stuck with what you got in life," to "We can choose how to share resources equitably amongst ourselves despite the luck of the draw." The Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, and, well, a lot of other resolutions seemed based on this concept of going from acceptance of no control over the path of your life to grabbing the reigns of your own horses.
But though the name Norn had this baggage of historical meaning, Saint Ingrid described them as both very powerful and very human. Their triumvirate of scientists, Ingrid said, hailed from another world of great knowledge and advanced technology (indistinguishable from magic). But their morality was as stunted as the earliest of civilizations of our known world. These scientists took a cold look at this world in A.D. 1000, according to the legends, and decided they would be able to sort fact from fiction in their own earliest recorded history and mythology only by experimentation, myth-busting on a global scale.
Did gods and goddesses of human-like intelligence control each island, river, continent, and ocean throughout our history? Did they influence the Trojan War? Do they influence our lives today? The way to answer those questions is to simulate the scenarios using puppets whose lives do not matter to you.
In our modern Christian-based morality, we would immediately jump to computer simulations of planetary civilization which would take into account the human will and individuality to the best of our understanding.
The Norns did it with real human beings.
It's more accurate that way...
... and incredibly immoral to genetically and micro-robotically engineer sea monsters and fire breathing dragons and set them loose on populations and sit back and count the death toll.
So imagine someone from our 25th century with all the biological and nanotechnological science traveling back in time to the 10th century to make mayhem, and finding themselves in a bare-knuckles fight with someone from our late 21st century who says, "No, that's just not right. Stop it." And this person has only 21st century technology to bring to the fight, just a chemistry set, a "3D-printer", a pocket-computer, and maybe a couple nuclear bombs.
The metaphor breaks down because we are well aware of (and control) the psychological "seeds of crime" so that 15 billion people share this Earth in peace and harmony (mostly) in our day and age, but if we deliberately raised a person with no sense of others, we would likely have another Norn on our hands.

This excerpt from the speech, "Dumbed Down History of the World", prepared by Stag, the machine-god, to teach Bili, the faun, who asked (though sadly so few people of the 25th century care to ask), "How did we get here?"

Die Nornen Urd, Werdanda, Skuld, unter der Welteiche Yggdrasil by Ludwig Burger (1825-1884)

Type

Expedition, Scientific