Hel

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There were two roads out of a Norse life, and the slower one ran downward. It went north, into the dark, for nine nights through valleys so deep that a rider could not see his own horse; it crossed a river loud with the noise of weapons, over a bridge thatched with gold; and it ended at a gate in a wall, behind which sat a figure half the color of living flesh and half the blue-black of a corpse. This was the longer of the two journeys, and the more common. The other road — the bright one, ending in a hall of the war-dead feasting against the end of the world — was reserved for the few who fell by the sword. Everyone else took the downward road, and at the end of it sat Hel.

Hel is both the goddess and the place; in the Old Norse the one word Hel serves for the ruler and her kingdom alike, and the sources slide between them without warning. She is the least visualized of the great Norse divine figures and in some ways the most consequential, because her realm was the ordinary destination — the gray continuation that awaited the farmer who died in his bed, the woman who died in childbed, the child carried off by fever, the old man who simply wore out. Where most of the gods are known by their deeds, Hel is known chiefly by her demesne and by a single appearance, late and unforgettable, at the threshold of her hall.

Hel standing above her realm with a staff and the hound Garmr; below her a serpent coils among roots and a shadowed host of the dead. Johannes Gehrts, 1889, for Walhall: Germanische Götter- und Heldensagen. Public domain (Wikimedia Commons).

The third child cast down

She comes of a bad family. The fullest account is Snorri Sturluson’s, set down in the Prose Edda in Iceland around 1220 — and it must be said at once that Snorri wrote two hundred years after his countrymen had accepted Christianity, as a learned antiquarian preserving and ordering a pagan inheritance he no longer shared. His Gylfaginning is the single richest source for Hel, but it is a thirteenth-century Christian’s systematization of older and patchier material, and where it supplies tidy detail the detail is sometimes his.

In Snorri’s telling, Loki fathered three children upon the giantess Angrboda: the wolf Fenrir; the world-serpent Jormungandr, flung into the sea to encircle the earth; and Hel. The gods had been warned that this brood, raised in the land of the giants, would bring them grief. Odin had the three brought to him. The serpent he cast into the deep; the wolf the gods reared among themselves until they could bind him; and Hel he threw down into Niflheim, the world of mist and cold, and there gave her authority over nine worlds, with the charge that she apportion lodging to all who were sent to her — namely, in Snorri’s words, those who die of sickness or of old age. So the third monster was not destroyed but installed. Her exile was a coronation. The same gesture that removed her from Asgard made her the keeper of the largest population in the cosmos.

Snorri lingers on her household with a grim, almost allegorical relish, naming its furniture as if each piece were a small sermon. Her hall is called Eljudnir, “rain-damp” or “sleet-cold.” Her dish is Hunger and her knife is Famine; her manservant is Ganglati and her maid Ganglot, both names meaning something like “slow-mover” or “sluggard”; her threshold is Stumbling-block, her bed is Sick-bed, and the hangings of that bed are Gleaming-bale. She herself, Snorri writes, is half flesh-colored and half blue-black, and easily known by her lowering, fierce expression. The catalog is so neatly built — every object a synonym for the manner of dying that delivers its owner to her door — that scholars have long suspected the schematic completeness of it is Snorri’s own literary work rather than old inherited lore. The image, though, took hold: a queen the color of half-death, presiding over a house furnished out of slowness, sickness, and want.

Hel, the wolf Fenrir, and the world-serpent Jormungandr, the three children of Loki and the giantess Angrboda. Lorenz Frølich, 19th century. Public domain (Wikimedia Commons).

The name itself is older and plainer than the figure. Hel descends from a Proto-Germanic root meaning to cover, hide, or conceal — the same root that gives Old Norse hellir, a cave, and that lies behind the English word hall and behind hole. Hel is, at bottom, “the concealed place,” the covered-over abode, a name for where the buried go that needs no goddess to explain it. The personified queen may well be secondary to the place; several scholars read the grim daughter of Loki as a relatively late personification of an older, more abstract “below,” her vivid biography a literary outgrowth of a word that once meant only “the grave.”

Two roads for the dead

What makes Hel matter is not her person but the geography of the dead she anchors, and the choice — or rather the lack of choice — that geography imposed. The Norse afterlife was not single. The conception that reaches us divides the dead by the manner of their dying, and the division is stark.

Those who fell in battle were, in the heroic ideal, taken up. The Valkyries — “choosers of the slain” — moved over the battlefield selecting the bravest of the fallen and bearing them to Valhalla, Odin’s hall, where they became the einherjar, the warrior dead who feast and fight by day and are made whole each night, training for the last war. Half the slain, in one source, went instead to the goddess Freyja in her field Folkvang. This was the bright road, and a reader of the heroic poetry could be forgiven for thinking it the normal one. It was not. It was the exception, reserved for the sword-death, the death that the warrior culture prized and the rest of the population mostly did not get.

Everyone else went down. To die in bed — of fever, of age, of childbed, of any of the thousand ways a person dies who is not killed in a fight — was to die what the Norse called the “straw death,” for the bedding of straw on which it happened, and the straw-dead went to Hel. The phrase carries a whole attitude in two words. To a warrior aristocracy the straw death was the death to be dreaded not for its pain but for its obscurity, the end that won no song; and there are hints in the literature of men who, feeling age come on, sought a wound rather than wear out in bed, as though to fall on the wrong road were a kind of failure. There is a hard edge to this. In a culture that fashioned its highest hope around the glory of falling in arms, the quiet death was the lesser end, and Hel’s realm carried the faint shadow of that judgment: it was where one went if one had not died well. But — and this is the crucial distinction, often lost — Hel’s realm was not, in the older heathen conception that the sources let us glimpse, a place of punishment. It was not designed to torment. It was simply the abode of the ordinary dead, a cold and shadowed continuation of existence rather than a sentence passed on sin. The straw-dead were not damned. They were merely there, below, in the covered place, going on in some diminished way.

Hel’s realm was a destination one could, in extremity, be made to visit and return from — but only a god or a sorcerer could attempt it. The Poetic Edda preserves a second descent in Baldrs draumar, “Baldr’s Dreams,” where Odin himself rides down the road to the eastern gate of Hel and there, by his magic, raises a long-dead seeress from her grave to make her foretell Baldr’s coming death and who will avenge it. The poem shows the underworld as a place the powerful could interrogate: the dead knew things the living did not, and a willing enough god could go down and wring the knowledge out of them. But the ordinary traveler did not come back, and the road’s slow drama is best known from the one story in which a living being makes the journey to undo a death.

When Baldr, the bright and beloved son of Odin and Frigg, was killed, the god Hermod rode Odin’s eight-legged horse down to fetch him back. For nine nights, Snorri writes, he rode through valleys so dark he could see nothing, until he came to the river Gjoll — “the loud one” — spanned by a bridge roofed with gleaming gold. On the bridge stood a maiden named Modgud, who kept count of the dead crossing and challenged the living rider: five whole troops of dead men, she told him, had ridden over the day before, and the bridge thundered no less under him alone, and he had not the color of the dead upon him. The road to Hel, she said, lay still downward and to the north. Hermod rode on to the wall around Hel’s domain, the barrier the sources variously call Helgrind, “Hel’s gate,” or Nagrind, “corpse-gate,” and rather than open it he set spurs to the horse and leapt clean over.

Hermod before Hel, pleading for the release of Baldr. John Charles Dollman, 1909, from H. A. Guerber’s Myths of the Norsemen. Public domain (Wikimedia Commons).

The ransom that failed

Inside the hall he found Baldr seated in the high seat — already a guest of the realm, already enrolled among the straw-dead, though no straw had killed him. Hermod stayed the night and in the morning made his plea to Hel: let Baldr ride home, for all the world mourned him. And here Hel speaks, in the one moment the sources give her a voice, and what she utters is not a refusal but a condition, exact and terrible in its fairness. It must be tested, she said, whether Baldr was as beloved as they claimed. If every thing in all the worlds, living and dead, would weep for him, he would go back to the Aesir. But if anything spoke against him, or refused to weep, then Hel would keep him.

The messengers went out and the whole world wept — men and beasts, the earth, the stones, the trees, all the metals, weeping as one has seen these things weep when they come out of frost into warmth. Everything wept but one. In a cave sat a giantess who gave her name as Thokk, and when asked to weep for Baldr she answered, in the old verse Snorri quotes, that Thokk would weep dry tears at his burial — she had no use for the son of Odin, alive or dead; let Hel keep what she held. And so Baldr stayed below. It was widely thought, Snorri adds, that this Thokk was Loki himself in disguise — the father undoing what the world had nearly won, so that his daughter kept the prize. The bright god did not return. He waits in Hel’s hall for the world’s ending, when the dead realms empty and the reckoning comes; and only on the far side of that ruin, in the renewed world, is he to walk again. Hel’s keeping is not eternal, but it is until the end of the age.

This single episode does more for Hel’s character than all the furniture of her hall. She is not cruel here, and not bargaining in bad faith. She names a price and the price is met by everyone but one, and she abides by the letter of her own terms. Her realm holds because a rule was kept, not because a tyrant willed it. That is the temper of the older Norse underworld: lawful, cold, and indifferent to appeal.

The word that became a fire

The afterlife of Hel is mostly the afterlife of her name, and it is one of the quieter ironies in the history of religion. When the Germanic peoples became Christian, their missionaries needed a word for the place of the damned that the new faith preached — the realm of fire and unending punishment, the antithesis of heaven. They reached for the word already in the language for the abode of the dead below: hell. So the cold, covered, neutral underworld of the heathen north lent its name to the burning Christian pit, and the two have been confused ever since. Modern English hell is, etymologically, Hel’s own house. But the thing the English word now means — torment as the wages of sin, fire, the sorting of souls into reward and retribution — is largely foreign to the original. The heathen Hel did not burn; it was, if anything, cold. It did not punish; it received. It made no moral sorting of the dead by their goodness, only by the manner of their death. The fire and the judgment came in with the new religion and were poured into the old vessel, and the vessel kept its name while losing its character.

Scholars now take some care to keep the two apart, writing Hel for the Norse goddess and her gray realm and hell for the Christian place of punishment that borrowed its name — a distinction the medieval Icelanders themselves could no longer fully draw, since by Snorri’s day the imported associations had been settling over the native word for two centuries. Even the Prose Edda’s neat allegorical furnishing of Hel’s hall — Hunger, Famine, Sick-bed — reads at moments like a faint Christianizing pull toward a place of deprivation and dread, a nudging of the neutral abode toward something more like a deserved fate. Where the line falls between the genuinely old conception and the medieval author’s shaping of it is among the harder questions the sources pose, and it cannot always be answered.

What survives, in any case, is the figure more than the doctrine. Hel kept her strangeness — the two-toned face, half quick and half dead; the hall named for sleet; the queen who was a monster’s child and a god’s prisoner and the warden of nearly everyone. She belongs to a vision of the dead that is neither hopeful nor punitive but simply true to a hard climate: that most people do not die in glory, that the road down is long and dark and cold, and that at the end of it there is not a fire and not a paradise but a hall, and a host already seated, and a half-corpse on the high seat keeping the count.

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