Hel: The Norse Goddess Who Rules the Ordinary Dead

Most Norse gods want you to die well. Odin takes half the battle-slain to Valhalla, Freya takes the other half to her field, and the whole glittering machinery of the sagas runs on the promise that a good death buys you a seat at a loud table.

Hel takes everyone else. The people who got sick. The people who got old. Children, farmers, women who died in childbirth, anyone whose ending came without a battle in it. That is the great majority of everyone who has ever lived, and Hel is the one who receives them.

Overview of Hel

Hel is the daughter of Loki and the giantess Angrboða, and the sister of the wolf Fenrir and the world-serpent Jörmungandr. She rules the world of the dead that carries her own name, a place beneath one of the roots of the world-tree Yggdrasil, reached by a long road downward and northward.

Her name and her country are the same word, which is the first strange thing about her. In Old Norse texts, hel can mean the place, the state of being dead, or the woman in charge, and the sources slide between the three without much warning. The word comes from a Proto-Germanic root meaning “concealed place,” built on a verb meaning to cover or to hide. The same root gives English the words “hall,” “hollow,” and, eventually, “hell.”

She is described in one memorable image: half of her is flesh-colored like a living woman, and the other half is black, or in some readings blue-black, the color of a corpse. Her expression is downcast and grim. She looks, in other words, exactly like what she governs, which is the boundary between the living body and the dead one.

Her country is a destination. Norse sources describe going to Hel the way they describe going anywhere else, as a journey with a road and a river and a gate. She receives the people who arrive on the strength of how they died, which for almost all of them was the ordinary way.

Titles

• Ruler of Hel, the place that shares her name
• Daughter of Loki and Angrboða
• Sister of Fenrir the wolf and Jörmungandr the world-serpent
• Mistress of Éljúðnir, her hall
• The one who keeps whatever comes to her

Characteristics

How the sources describe her:

• Half living flesh, half the black of a corpse, divided down the middle
• Downcast, severe, and slow to be moved
• Seated in a hall, receiving rather than traveling
• Absolutely literal about the terms of any bargain she makes
• Grim in appearance without ever being described as cruel

Symbols

• The road downward — the long north road the dead take to reach her
• The gate — the boundary of her country, which a living rider must jump
• Her hall — Éljúðnir, a name usually read as something like “sleet-damp”
• The half-and-half face — the living and the dead in one body
• The unweeping stone — the one refusal that kept Baldr with her

The stories the Norse told about Hel

Almost everything narrative about Hel comes through Snorri Sturluson’s thirteenth-century Prose Edda, written down two centuries after Iceland converted to Christianity. He is a magnificent storyteller and a systematizer, and both of those matter when reading him, as the section further down explains.

Odin casts her down

When the gods learned that Loki had fathered three children on a giantess in Jötunheim, and that prophecy said all three would bring them harm, Odin had them brought to him. He threw the serpent into the sea that encircles the world. He kept the wolf close, where he could be watched, until the gods bound him. And he cast Hel down into Niflheim, the misty world below, and gave her authority over everyone who dies of sickness and old age across the nine worlds.

Notice what that story does. Odin’s own punishment created her office. He handed her the largest population in the cosmos and then never seems to have thought about it again. The dead who go to her are the dead nobody wrote poems about.

The hall called Sleet-Cold

Snorri furnishes her house in a burst of grim comic detail, naming her possessions the way a poet names a hero’s sword. Her hall is Éljúðnir. Her dish is called Hunger and her knife is called Famine. Her servant is Ganglati and her serving-woman is Ganglöt, names that both mean something close to “slow-moving.” Her threshold is Stumbling-Block, her bed is Sick-Bed, and her bed-curtains are Gleaming-Bale.

The joke, if it is one, is bleak and precise. Everything in the house is named for the experience of dying slowly. This is the house of the long illness, furnished by someone who had watched one.

Baldr, and the one who would not weep

The most famous Hel story belongs to somebody else’s tragedy. Baldr, the beloved son of Odin and Frigg, was killed by a mistletoe dart, and he went to Hel, because his death came by a weapon in his brother’s hand but not in battle.

Frigg asked who would ride down and offer Hel a ransom. Hermóðr took Odin’s horse Sleipnir and rode nine nights through dark valleys, crossed the ringing bridge over the river Gjöll, and jumped the gate of Hel. He found Baldr sitting in the hall in the high seat, and he asked for him back.

Hel gave a condition instead of a refusal. If everything in the world, living and dead, would weep for Baldr, she would release him. If a single thing refused, she would keep him. The gods sent messengers everywhere, and everything wept: people, animals, the earth, the stones, the trees, and the metals. Then they found a giantess in a cave who gave her name as Þökk, and she said she would weep dry tears, and that Hel could keep what she had.

Snorri adds that people believe Þökk was Loki. The story leaves Hel in the right. She named terms, the terms were fair, the terms failed, and she kept her word to the letter. The tragedy runs through her, and it belongs to a father who could not accept a loss and a trickster who would not be moved.

What waits at Ragnarok

Her people ride out at the end. At Ragnarok the ship Naglfar sails with the dead aboard, Loki is loose, and Hel’s forces join the powers arrayed against the gods. Then the world burns and drowns and comes up green again, and Baldr returns from Hel’s country to the new world with his brother.

That last detail is the argument the whole cycle makes. Hel keeps what she is given, and she keeps it exactly as long as the terms hold. When the world ends, what she held is handed back.

Was Hel ever a goddess?

This is the genuinely open question about her, and the scholarship has been arguing it for two centuries.

The case for a late personification runs like this. In the older skaldic and Eddic poetry, hel almost always reads naturally as a place or a condition rather than a woman. Poets say a man “went to hel” the way they might say he went into the ground. Nothing in the archaeological record, and nothing in the place-name evidence, clearly attests a cult of a goddess called Hel. On this reading, poets personified the word the way poets personify death in every language, and Snorri, writing a systematic handbook of a religion nobody was practicing anymore, took the personification and gave it a father, a hall, and a set of named furniture. John Lindow and Rudolf Simek have both argued along these lines, with Simek putting it about as strongly as it can be put.

The case on the other side is older and has been revived. Jacob Grimm, in the nineteenth century, thought Hel was among the oldest conceptions in Germanic religion and compared her to the dark goddesses of other traditions. Hilda Ellis Davidson, who in 1968 leaned toward the personification reading, later changed her mind and compared Hel to the Irish battle-goddesses Badb and the Morrígan, figures who are also grim, also associated with the dead, and also unmistakably ancient. Her later position was that Hel should not be assumed to be entirely Snorri’s literary invention.

Both readings are live, and the honest answer is that the surviving evidence underdetermines the question. Iceland’s conversion put roughly two hundred years between the practice and the writing, and everything about Hel comes to us across that gap. What can be said is that the half-dead woman who receives the ordinary dead and honors her bargains is a figure people have found worth keeping for eight hundred years since, whatever her age before that.

Hel and the word “hell”

The English word “hell” descends from the same Germanic root as her name, and early Christian missionaries in Germanic-speaking areas used it to translate the Christian place of punishment. That borrowing has done more to shape what people expect from Hel than any Norse source.

The two ideas have little in common. Hel’s country has no fire, no torment, no devil, and no moral test at the door. It receives the sick and the old, which is to say it receives almost everybody. Baldr, the most beloved of the gods, sits in a high seat there. A modern reader arriving at Hel through the English word is set up to expect a punishment and finds a waiting room instead.

Final thoughts

Hel is the goddess of the death almost everyone gets. No sword, no last stand, no poem: an illness, or a slow accumulation of years, and then a long road north and downward to a hall where somebody is expecting you.

Her half-and-half face says the thing plainly. She is made of the living and the dead in equal measure, because the border between the two is where she works and because everybody standing on one side of it is going to cross. What the Norse gave her was authority, a house, and terms she keeps.

The heroes got the loud hall and the poems. When your own ending comes the ordinary way, whose company do you want waiting at the other end of the road?

Bibliography

• Snorri Sturluson. The Prose Edda, Gylfaginning. The account of Hel’s parentage, her casting-down, the furnishings of Éljúðnir, and Hermóðr’s ride. Trans. Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur.
• The Poetic Edda, Völuspá and Baldrs draumar, on the road to Hel and the halls of the dead. Trans. Henry Adams Bellows.
• Lindow, John. Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs. Oxford University Press. On the older poetry’s treatment of hel as a place, and the argument that the personification came later.
• Simek, Rudolf. Dictionary of Northern Mythology. D. S. Brewer. The strongest statement of the late-personification position.
• Davidson, Hilda Ellis. Roles of the Northern Goddess. Routledge, 1998. The later comparison to Badb and the Morrígan, and the caution against treating Hel as purely Snorri’s invention.
• Grimm, Jacob. Teutonic Mythology. The nineteenth-century case for Hel as one of the oldest Germanic conceptions.
• “Hel (mythological being)”. Wikipedia. Survey of the attestations, the etymology, and the state of the scholarly debate.
• Cartwright, Mark. “Hel”. World History Encyclopedia.