By Jackson Crawford, University of Colorado Boulder
For the Norse, living in a world beset by violence and by untreatable disease, death was always near, and no one would have lived through an average year without having to take part in at least one funeral. Thus, they had definite rituals and beliefs associated with death, the afterlife, and Hel.
Hel and Valhalla
The concept of a soul that is separable was quite foreign to pre-Christian Norse culture. The body, when it was put away, continued to be inhabited somewhere.
The literary sources, foremost among them the Eddas, present a fairly neat dichotomy between Valhalla for the men who die in battle and Hel for all the other dead. It is likely that this picture is a late one, favored at the end of the Viking Age in Iceland and other western parts of Scandinavia.
At the same time, there are hints that everyone went to Hel, and that the idea of Valhalla emerged later.
Hel
The word “Hel” comes from a root that means “cover” or “hide”, the same that we find in English words like hole, hel-met, hol-ster, and indeed, Hell. Based on this etymology, the name of Hel can be taken as simply “covered place”, or in other words potentially the grave itself. The word Hel can also be used for just the grave, or metonymically of death in general.
Our written sources speak of the realm of Hel as being vaguely beneath the living, but also sometimes northward from the living. The association with the underground is readily understandable because of the grave.
The association with the north is perhaps due to the inhospitable condition of the landscape as one travels farther north in Scandinavia so that some of the bleak lands within the Arctic Circle might seem more fitting for the dead than the living.
Hel’s Association with Water
Hel is also associated with Niflheim, the watery realm to the north that preceded the creation of the earth. This suggests a damp, cool place of the dead, corresponding with the damp, cool graves the deceased would be placed in during the seasons in Scandinavia when graves and burial mounds can be dug into the thawed earth.
So Viking “Hel” is not hot.
Snorri has a compelling description of it, and of the being, also named Hel, who rules it. The Prose Edda talks about Odin casting Hel into Niflheim and giving her the power in all the nine realms to portion out room and board for all those who were sent to her, and those are the people who die of sickness or old age.
This conception of the afterlife has a lot of physicalities. Hel is a place where people eat and drink, and indeed where food is grown on farms.
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Hel the Being
Hel the being has more of the grim accompaniments. Her hall is named Storm-Increaser, her plate is Hunger, her knife is Starvation, her slave is Walking Man, and her slave woman is Walking Woman.
The threshold of her door is Falling Pit, her bed is Deathbed, and the tapestries hanging above it are Glittering Misfortune. She is half blue and half flesh-colored, and for this reason, she is easy to recognize and also both sad-looking and cruel-looking.
Hel is half blue and half flesh-colored. The half of her that is blue presumably looks dead, as dead bodies (and the walking dead) are said to be blue in the sagas.
Blue: The Color of the Dead
In The Saga of the Swamp Dwellers, zombies are described as “still unrotten, and very trollish to see. He was blue as Hel and thick as a steer”.
Blue is the hue that the Norse associated with dead and rotten human bodies. This association was further reinforced by the fact that ravens are called blue in Old Norse poetry. Both the dead and the eaters of the dead then shared a category of color that the queen of the dead half-shared with them.
Ambiguity about Hel
Most artists and interpreters in the centuries since have imagined Hel’s appearance as half that of a living woman, half that of a dead one. Whether her appearance is split vertically or horizontally, and which side is which, is not something Snorri specified—very typical for the Eddas.
Hel seems originally to have been the destiny for all the dead, or at least a term that covered all the afterlives. By contrast, the term Valhalla does not even originally look like it meant an afterlife.
Is Hel the Grave Itself?
Brave warriors, even berserkers, who died in battle are portrayed as in Hel in some literary sources such as The Saga of Hervor and Heithrek.
In this short saga, the berserker Angantyr has fallen in battle, and yet when his daughter, Hervor, breaks open his grave, she finds him there, still inhabiting his grave as a corpse. There is no reference to Valhalla, but there is a reference to Hel when he says this to his daughter about opening his grave:
Hel’s gate draws up,
the grave mounds open,
everything is in flame
on the island around.
Is Hel, then, the grave itself? That seems likely from the zombie berserker’s statement that it’s Hel’s gate that opens when his own grave mound is broken open.
So whatever elaborate picture Snorri might draw in his Prose Edda of Hel as one place, it is also simply the grave. It is most broadly the place where the dead are, wherever that might be.
And a dead man is, most fundamentally, where the living left him and last saw him—in the grave. This is true even of men destined for Valhalla.
Common Questions about the Idea of Death and Hel in Norse Mythos
The concept of a soul that is separable was quite foreign to pre-Christian Norse culture. The body, when it was put away, continued to be inhabited somewhere.
As per Norse mythology, Valhalla a place for the men who died in battle and Hel was for all the other dead.
Hel is a place where people eat and drink, and indeed where food is grown on farms. Written sources speak of the realm of Hel as being vaguely beneath the living, but also sometimes northward from the living.
