"Of the runes of the giants and all the gods,
I can tell with truth.
I have been to into nine worlds below, to Niflhel;
There men die out of Hel."
- Vafthrudhismal 43 (translation by Hilda Davidson)
"Three roots do spread in threefold ways
beneath the ash Yggdrasil
dwell etins 'neath one, 'neath the other, Hel,
'neath the third; Midgardh's men."
- Grimnismal 31 (Hollander translation)
Lee Hollander translates Hel to "The Concealer"
"There was a giantess called Angrboda in Giantland. With her Loki had three children. One was Fenriswolf, the second Iormungandr, the third is Hel... Hel [did the All-Father] throw into Niflheim and gave her authority over nine worlds, such that she has to administer board and lodging to those sent to her, and that is those who die of sickness or old age. She has great mansions there and her walls are exceptionally high and the gates great. Her hall is called Eliudnir, her dish Hunger, her knife Famine, the servant Ganglati, serving-maid Ganglot, her threshold where you enter Stumbling-block, her bed Sick-bed, her curtains Gleaming-bale. She is half black and half flesh covered - thus she is easily recognizable - and rather downcast and fierce looking."
- Gylfaginning (translation by Anthony Faulkes)
"...Then Hermod rode up to the hall and dismounted from his horse, went into the hall, saw sitting there in the seat of honour his brother Baldr; and Hermod stayed there the night. In the morning Hermod begged from Hel that Baldr might ride home with him and said what great weeping there was among the Aesir. But Hel said that it must be tested whether Baldr was as beloved as people said in the following way, 'if all things in the world, alive and dead, weep for him, then he shall go back to the Aesir, but be kept with hel if any object refuses to weep.'"
- Gylfaginning (translation by Anthony Faulkes)
In Skaldsparmal, "companion of Hel" is a used as a kenning for Baldr, and "monstruous wolf's sister" is a kenning for Hel.
"Ravens flocked to the reddened sword, spears plucked lives and gory shafts sped. The scourge of Scots fed the wolves that trolls ride, Loki's daughter, Hel, trod the eagle's food."- Egil's Saga, Chapter 60, verse 10 of poem (Bernard Scudder translation).
"The end is all. Even now High on the headland Hel stands and waits Life fades, I must fall And face my own end Not in misery and mourning But with a man's heart."- Egil's Saga, Chapter 78, last verse of the first poem in the chapter (Penguin Classics edition).
"By Hel's summons, a great king Was called away to Odin's Thing: King Halfdan, he who dwelt of late At Holtar, must obey grim Fate. At Borre, in the royal mound, They laid the hero in the ground."- Yngling Saga, Chapter 52 (translation by Laing, London 1844)
"Snorri refers to these nine worlds in Gylfaginning (XXXIV) when he tells us that the goddess Hel was cast into Niflheim, and given power over nine worlds, 'so that she should find places in her abodes for those who were sent to her'. It seems likely, however, that Snorri's account of the queen of the Underworld is chiefly his own work. The idea that those who enter her realm have died of sickness and old age sound like an attempt to reconcile the tradition with the description he has given of Valholl, especially since the one detailed picture he himself gives us of Hel consists of the story of the entry of Balder within her gates, who died neither of old age or sickness."
Hilda Davidson, Road to Hel, page 83-84
Hella (Hel, Hell, Hölle, Halja, *Haljon)
This goddess was known to all the Germanic peoples, including the Goths: a Gothic word for "witch" was haljoruna - Hella-runester. She must have been the goddess of the underworld from a very early time, as her name is given to that land in all the Germanic tongues. The name itself stems from a root meaning "to hide": she is the concealer. Simek compares the description of the road to Hel as "down and to the north" to the burial mounds of European megalithic culture, which "always have their entrances to the south and the burial chamber to the north...also the north-south orientation is predominant in Bronze Age ship settings and Vendel and Viking Age ship graves". He strengthens his identification of Hel with these family cairns by pointing out that the Old Irish cognate to her name is cuile, "cellar", which is a reasonable development from the mound-covered rock-chamber (Dictionary, pp. 137-38).
Hella is a rather ambiguous figure in the Norse pantheon: as ruler of the Underworld, she has the status of a Goddess and queen; as Loki's daughter, sister of the Wolf Fenrir and the Middle-Garth's Wyrm, she appears as a demonic figure. The belief in Hella as ruler of the underworld is likely very archaic; the belief that she is part of Loki's monstrous family goes back at least to the ninth century, appearing in the skaldic poem Ynglingatal, where it says "I tell no secret, Gná-of-Glitnir (the horse-goddess - Glitnir, "glistening", is listed as a horse-heiti, and one goddess' name is often subsituted for another in kennings) has Dyggvi's corpse for her delight, for the horse-idis of the Wolf and Narvi chose the king, and Loki's daughter has the ruler of the folk of Yngvi as her plaything". Although it has been suggested that Hella as a person is late and perhaps even post-heathen (Simek, Dictionary, p. 138), her appearance in this poem makes it clear that she was firmly established as a free-standing personality in the Viking Age. It may be particularly noted that it is implied in Ynglingatal that the dead man will receive the personal favours of Hella, a theme which also shows up in Saxo's version of the Balder-story, where Balder dreams of the embraces of "Persephone" (Hella). Grimm, citing the great many Hella-based place-names of continental Germany, as well as her appearance as "Mother Hölle" in German folklore, is of the opinion that she may well have preceded many of the other deities, and perhaps even that the name and idea of the realm devolved from the goddess herself. As a matter of fact, the older the versions of the Germanic Goddess of Death are, the less "hellish" and more godlike she appears.
The Goddess Hel is sometimes represented as a personification of Death, with the Wolf and Serpent as Pain and Sin, respectively. This is another pretty medićval (or even Victorian) sentiment - surely death, a natural part of the cycle of life, is not equivalent to sin (in the christian sense - in the original sense, as Gert McQueen has pointed out, "sin" meant only "being"). This is part of the need felt by some for all three of Loki's children to represent awful monsters of some sort. But Hel always stands out from the other two. Instead of being bound or imprisoned, Hel is given rule over her own realm. In the Baldr story, she stands as an equal with the Ćsir, refusing to give in to their demands unless on her own terms. She is very possibly an older concept, that of the Death Goddess, which was stuck into a later myth-cycle in a convenient place, as happens to so many other deities. Death is too ancient and primal a concept to be such a late-comer into a pantheon.
As a goddess of death, Hel is not only the receiver of the dead, sometimes she comes herself to claim them. This is spoken of in the quote from Ynglingatal (above). During the Black Plague, which ravaged Norway and other parts of Scandinavia to an even greater degree than the rest of Western Europe, Hel was said to travel the countryside with a broom and a rake. In villages where some survived, she was said to have used the rake; if a whole community perished, she had used her broom.
However, generally she is simply the keeper of the souls of the departed, welcoming them into her house, which was viewed as a sort of inn for the dead, and holding them with an inexorable grip, on no account giving up anyone once she had them. This idea of the Death Goddess being unpitying and immovable, never giving back one she has taken, is certainly apparent in Hel's refusal to let Baldr go. The giantess Ţökk in the Baldr story, who refuses to weep for him, is often supposed to be Loki, making double sure Baldr stays dead for his own evil reasons. But the claim could be made that she is Death herself, the one being who would feel no need to weep for Baldr. "What Hel has, she may keep", Ţökk says. Hermóđr does not understand Hel's hidden meaning when she says all things must weep for Baldr to prove he was universally mourned. What she means, perhaps, is that all the worlds may wish Baldr back, but death herself will remain inexorable.
The ancient death Goddess was often pictured as having gaping jaws and a ravening wolfish nature (which is reminiscent of Hel's brother Fenrir, whose jaws, when open, stretched from Heaven to Earth). The Norse Hel is pictured as a woman of very stern demeanor and parti-coloured - sometimes half black or blue and half white, sometimes half corpse flesh and half living, by which, as Snorri puts it in his Edda, "she is easily recognized" (no doubt!). Sometimes it is suggested that her upper half is white/living and her lower half is black/rotting, but one may well suspect that this has more to do with the neuroses of modern society than with the beliefs of our ancestors; Karter Neal, who has done much work with this goddess, says that she always sees Hella's two halves as being right side/left side. An interesting point to bring up here is a passage from ibn Fadlan's descriptions of the Rus, where a corpse is buried temporarily in the frozen earth while preparations are made for the funeral; when it was dug up, the cold had turned the flesh black. The Norse were also surely aware of the phenomenon of livor mortis, which, after a few hours, causes the skin of whatever parts of the body are lowest to take on a bluish-purple hue. The dead are either described as helblár (Hel blue/black) or nábleikr, náfölr (corpse-pale).
This two-coloured aspect can symbolize death's two sides - ugly and peaceful. It may be worth noting that those dead who do become helblár are usually those who walk as draugar after their deaths - the evil dead, in other words.
Leaving scholarly speculations for more mystical ones, I (Alice Karlsdóttir) have done a series of meditations on Hel over a few years, trying to find out what sort of deity she is, and have seldom seen her as two-coloured. She appears either all hideous (which seems to amuse her greatly as being a huge joke on everyone), or all beautiful, with very pale skin, hair, eyes, and garments, and always with her crown on. Death appears fearsome and ugly to the living, for we see it as an end to all we know and love, often accompanied by pain and fear. But if death is a part of life and the natural cycle of things, and if the soul continues in another life afterwards, might not Death appear beautiful to one who is dying, a welcome release from pain, a doorway to a new existence? When death is truly accepted and understood, it loses its hideous face. Perhaps this is what Hel's two-faced quality represents. There are as many references to beauty in her realm as ugliness. It comes down to whether we are going to be willing to accept death or not, but willing or not, we must face her sooner or later.
Hella's chief animal is the horse; the Scandinavian belief in the helhest is spoken of under "Soul, Death, and Rebirth". She is also seen as a three-legged white goat; another folk belief was that Hel had a huge ox which went from place to place during times of sickness and whose breath caused people to fall down dead.
Hella's colours are black or deep blue-black and white. Runes associated with her in modern times are Hagalaz, Berkano, and Isa.
Excerpt taken from Our Troth, Chapter XIII.
The Norse conception of the afterlife is very complex and detailed. The most important features are the many rivers referred to in the Eddas, and the high gates of Hel, which can only be crossed by Sleipnir (which could be why horses were often buried/burned with the dead. It is interesting to note that horses are symbols of both fertility and death, dual-natured as Hela herself is). Hel shoes were given to the dead for their journey on the “Road to Hel”, and ship burials were not uncommon either. This all suggests there was a great deal of travelling going on in the afterlife. All of these preparations further suggest there is a possibility one might get lost in the process, which may well be why there are many recorded instances of gods/Disir/fetches being present at the time of death. In Scandinavian Folklore, even today, seeing a dead ancestor on Midgardh is said to foretell one’s own death. In the Egil quote above (Chapter 78), Hel is seen “waiting” on the headland when death is near. There is another belief that most people will never see their spirit animal (fetch) until they are about to die. In all these cases, the entity may appear to serve as a guide into death for the deceased.
For the blot itself, we adorned the altar with a picture of Hela (drawn by Joe Mandato), with a ceramic skull on one side of the altar and a small potted plant on another (representing her dual nature, and power over both death and life). The ritual itself began with a “Hagalaz” chant, which was the rune we most associated with Hela as a group. Arthur did the hammer rite, Joe performed the general blessing, Jon the invocation of Hela, Catheryn the blessing of the mead, Lorien the libation, and Tom served as Valkyrie. Due to the large number of people in attendance, we only performed one round of toasts, although we had a long sumbel afterwards.