Hel

Hel is the Norse goddess who rules the realm of the dead that bears her name, Helheim, the cold place below the world to which go those who die of sickness and old age rather than in battle, for the slain in war are claimed instead by Odin and Freyja. She is a daughter of the trickster Loki and the giantess Angrboda, and sister of the great wolf Fenrir and the world-serpent Jormungandr. Snorri describes her as half one colour and half another, one side the hue of living flesh, the other the blue-black of a corpse, a body that shows her nature as the boundary between life and death. Odin, the story goes, cast her down into the mist-world and gave her authority over the nine realms of the dead, to apportion lodging to all who came to her.

Unlike major cult-gods such as Thor or Freyr, Hel has left no trace of shrine, offering or place-name confidently tied to active worship; she appears to have functioned for the Norse almost entirely as a mythological and literary figure describing where the ordinary dead went, rather than as a deity anyone prayed to or sacrificed for favour, a pattern comparative religion scholars have noted resembles the Greek Hades, another ruler of the dead who commanded remarkably little independent cult despite his central place in myth. In both traditions the power that presides over ordinary death seems to have mattered more as an explanatory figure than as an object of active devotion.

Hel's most important moment in the mythology is her refusal in the tale of Baldr. When the beloved god is killed and Hermod rides down to her hall to plead for his release, Hel does not simply refuse; she sets a condition that seems generous but proves impossible, she will let Baldr go if every single thing in the world, living and dead, weeps for him. When one giantess (widely taken to be Loki in disguise) declines to weep, Baldr must stay, and Hel keeps him until the renewal of the world after Ragnarok. Her hall, with its grim furnishings, and its very name became, through the conversion, one root of the English word and idea of hell, though the Norse Hel was originally less a place of punishment than simply the abode of the ordinary dead, presided over by a goddess who kept firmly what was given into her charge.

Snorri's Prose Edda gives Hel's hall, called Eljudnir, a set of grimly named furnishings that read almost as dark wordplay: her dish is called Hunger, her knife Famine, her bed Sick-bed and its curtains Gleaming Bale, and her threshold Stumbling-block, a household inventory of deprivation and misfortune that turns the ordinary vocabulary of a Norse home into an image of death's bare, comfortless keeping. The description is often read less as a picture of active torment than as an image of the dead stripped of all the warmth, plenty and hospitality that defined a proper Norse household in life.