Goddess of the Norse land of the dead (also called Hel, as mentioned prior) and daughter of the trickster god, Loki, Hel is sometimes depicted as a beautiful woman, though mostly as a rotting corpse, and always somber and gloomy. She rules the afterlife destination of those who have not died a hero's death in battle but rather a "regular" death by old age or disease. Her name and her eponymous realm of the dead were adopted by Germanic-language Christians as "Hell," the place of eternal torment after death. [1]
The scholarly community is mixed as to whether or not the Vikings actually believed Hel was an actual deity. With only ambiguous archeological evidence and lack of mention of her until near the end of the Viking age, the modern consensus seems to be that Hel was a poetic personification of the underworld (thus the deity was named after the location, and not the other way around) and that Christian missionaries who converted Scandinavia during the late Viking age emphasized her existence as a Satan-like evil figure who presided over a frightening afterlife. [2]
Still, the minority of scholars who defend that she was, indeed, a separate deity and not a poetic personification of Hel believe that she was originally a more majestic goddess who only started to get a bad rap during the Christianization of the Vikings because the missionaries needed a satanic local counterpart to God and a way to villify strong, unrelenting women in power. [3]
~"Morbid Magic" by Tomas Prower
[1] Snorri Sturlson, The Prose Edda, trans. Jesse Byock (New York: Penguin Books, 2006).
[2] Hilda Roderick Ellis, The Road to Hel: A Study of the Conception of the Dead in Old Norse Literature (Santa Barbara: Prager, 1968).
[3] Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology, trans. by Angela Hall (Rochester: Boydell & Brewer, 2008).
Scholars genuinely don't know what the fuck to make of Hel, and I love that for her.
