Hel

Hel is the Norse goddess who rules Helheim, the realm of the dead who did not fall in battle. Daughter of Loki and the giantess Angrboda, she governs a vast cold realm beneath the roots of Yggdrasil, the World Tree, receiving the souls of all who die of illness, old age, accident, or any cause other than glorious battle death. This makes her, in practical terms, the ruler of the majority of the Norse dead, since most people throughout history die in ordinary rather than heroic circumstances.

She is a figure of impartial sovereign authority over her domain, neither cruel nor particularly warm, but just in her governance. In contemporary Heathenry she is honored as an ancestor goddess and as the keeper of most of those who have gone before, making her an important figure in any practice that involves honoring the dead.

History and origins

Hel is attested primarily in the Prose Edda, where Snorri Sturluson describes Odin’s casting of Loki’s three monstrous children from Asgard into different realms: Fenrir the wolf was bound in Asgard, Jormungandr was cast into the ocean surrounding Midgard, and Hel was thrown into Niflheim, the primordial realm of cold and mist, and given authority over nine worlds of the dead. Snorri describes her hall as Eljudnir, with dishes named Hunger and a knife named Famine, her male servant called Ganglati (slow-moving) and her maidservant Ganglot (the same), and her bed called Sick-bed.

This heavily allegorical description reflects Snorri’s literary and possibly Christian-influenced treatment of Norse material. The underlying folk belief in a realm of the ordinary dead and its ruler is likely much older. Her name is cognate with the Old English hell and the Proto-Germanic halja, meaning “hidden place” or “covered place,” referring to a subterranean realm. The English word “hell” and the name Hel share this same root.

In practice

Hel is approached in contemporary Heathen practice primarily in the context of ancestral veneration and grief work. Because she governs the majority of the Norse dead, she is the one who holds most of the souls of ancestors that practitioners wish to honor or connect with.

Offerings to Hel are made low, placed on the ground or buried, reflecting her subterranean domain. Cold water, dark bread, winter herbs, black candles, and objects that belonged to the deceased are appropriate. She is approached at Samhain (October 31) and during the winter months, when the dead are traditionally closer to the living. She is addressed respectfully and without the attempt to manipulate or extract; she governs the dead according to her own law, not according to mortal urgency.

Life and work

Hel’s most significant mythological role occurs in connection with the death of Baldr, the beloved son of Odin. After Baldr was killed by the mistletoe dart thrown by Hodr at Loki’s instigation, the gods sent Odin’s son Hermod to ride to Hel’s realm to negotiate his return. Hel told Hermod that she would release Baldr if every being in the world, living and dead, wept for him. Every being did weep, except for a giantess (widely understood to be Loki in disguise) who refused. Because the condition was not universally met, Hel kept Baldr in her realm until after Ragnarok.

This narrative shows Hel as a sovereign who keeps to the terms of her domain. She does not release the dead out of sentiment or pressure, but she does establish clear conditions and honors them. The story is also one of the few in Norse mythology that gives the cold realm of Helheim a specific inhabitant who is described as waiting: Baldr dwells in Hel’s realm, still beloved, until the world ends and is remade.

Legacy

Hel’s name gave English its word for the underworld, a linguistic legacy that obscures her actual mythological character by associating her with the moral punishment-focused Christian Hell. In contemporary Heathenry, reclaiming Hel as a neutral and sovereign deity of the dead rather than a figure of damnation is an important aspect of reconstructing pre-Christian Norse spiritual understanding. She is honored by practitioners engaged with ancestral work, with grief, and with the principle that ordinary death, the death that comes to most of us, deserves its own sacred recognition.

In myth and popular culture

The myth of Baldr’s death and Hermod’s ride to Hel to negotiate his return is one of the most memorable narratives in Norse mythology, and Hel’s role in it is pivotal. The condition she sets, that every being in the nine worlds must weep for Baldr, is logical and sovereign: she does not break her own laws for sentiment, but she is willing to negotiate within them. This makes her one of the few underworld deities in any mythology who is neither purely tyrannical nor sentimental, but bound by her own principles as surely as the living are bound by theirs.

Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology (2017) retells the Baldr story and gives Hel a characterization consistent with the Prose Edda’s account: cold, matter-of-fact, and perfectly at home in her own domain. Gaiman’s portrayal has been widely read and has brought Hel to the attention of a generation of readers who might not otherwise have encountered her.

Marvel’s Thor franchise created a character named Hela, played by Cate Blanchett in Thor: Ragnarok (2017), who is heavily inspired by Hel in name and domain but significantly altered in characterization. Marvel’s Hela is an active villain and conqueror, nothing like the passive, sovereign, and impartial Hel of the Eddas. Contemporary Heathens generally note this divergence and treat the Marvel version as an independent fictional character.

In modern fiction, Hel appears in various forms in urban fantasy. Joanne Harris’s novel Runemarks (2007) includes a version of Hel that draws on the Eddic tradition more closely than most popular treatments, presenting her half-living and half-dead appearance and her cold but not cruel governance of the dead.

Myths and facts

The conflation of Hel with Hell generates more persistent misconceptions than perhaps any other Norse deity.

• Hel’s realm is not a place of punishment. In the Eddic sources, Helheim is cold and dim and characterized by the ordinary qualities of shade-existence, but it is not a place where souls are tortured or judged as unworthy. Virtually everyone who is not killed in battle goes there, regardless of how they lived.
• The word “Hell” in English derives from the same Proto-Germanic root as Hel’s name, but the two concepts diverged significantly after the Christianization of Germanic-speaking peoples. The Christian Hell was shaped by Greek Tartarus, Gehenna from Hebrew tradition, and theological developments that have nothing to do with Norse cosmology.
• Hel is described as neither fully alive nor fully dead in the Prose Edda, but this does not mean she is a zombie or a corpse. Her dual appearance is a symbolic representation of her dual nature as ruler of the boundary between life and death, a liminal figure like Hecate or Persephone in other traditions.
• Hel is the daughter of Loki in the Eddic sources, but this does not make her sinister or evil in those sources. Loki is a complex figure, not a straightforward villain, and his children’s associations with dangerous domains (the sea, the underworld, the binding of the gods) reflect his connection to the forces that exist outside ordinary social order rather than his moral character.
• Working with Hel is not the same as worshipping death or courting morbidity. Contemporary Heathen practitioners who honor her do so in the context of ancestral reverence and grief work, recognizing that the ordinary death that ends most lives deserves its own theological and devotional acknowledgment.