h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

There is another version of what the Fates actually do.
The name Clotho means "the woman who spins thread" and that is what she does. When the thread snaps, the life ends.
Lachesis uses something like a lottery for important events in a person's life. Her name comes from a verb that means "to happen by chance".
Atropos writes people's fate in a book. Whatever she has written cannot be changed - that is the meaning of her name. In Greece, the proverbial phrase "whatever is written cannot be 'un-written'" is used until today. People's fate is sometimes referred to as "what has been written".

In addition, I don't think they were blind.

This is a great entry, by the way.

perhaps the thing about the Greek Fates being blind is a conflation with the Norns, in the Germanic/Scandinavian pantheon, who together posessed only one eye but took it in turns to wear it?
It's interesting how opposite ends of Europe and radically different ethnicity independently came up with the same concept of Three Fates/Norns governing the destinies of Men and Gods, both triads being weavers and cutters of thread.

(Or perhaps the Greeks sailed PAST Hyperborea (the British Isles) and wound up in the land of smorgasbrod and pickled herring: maybe they either took the story of the Norns home to Greece with them, or they implanted in in Scandinavia?)After all, if they traded with Britain, who's to say they had no awareness of a land mass beyond to the north-east?