Hel was the Norse goddess and ruler of the realm of the dead that bears her name — the grim, half-living, half-corpse daughter of Loki who presided over the shadowy afterlife of those who died of sickness and old age. Neither cruel nor kind but coldly impartial, she is the queen of the dead in the Norse imagination, and her name has passed, by a long road, into our word for the underworld itself.
The Daughter of Loki
Hel (Old Norse Hel) was one of the three monstrous children of the trickster Loki by the giantess Angrboda — sister to the great wolf Fenrir and the world-serpent Jörmungandr. When Odin learned that Loki's children were fated to bring great harm, he cast Hel down into the cold lower world and gave her dominion over it — authority over all the dead who came to her, that she might give them lodging in her vast, grim halls. She was described as half one colour and half another — one side of her a living woman, the other side the blue-black of a rotting corpse — a fitting form for the queen of death, at once alive and dead.
The Realm of Hel
The realm she ruled, also called Hel (or Niflheim in its deepest cold), lay far below the world, reached by the long dark road that Hermod rode and guarded by the river Gjöll. To it came the great mass of the dead — not the warriors slain gloriously in battle, who went to Odin's Valhalla or Freya's Fólkvangr, but those who died of sickness, of old age, of the ordinary deaths that claim most mortals. Her hall was called Éljudnir, and her domain was a cold, dim, joyless place — not a hell of torment like later Christian visions, but a shadowy, gloomy abode where the dead simply continued, grey and quiet, beyond the reach of the living world.
The Keeper Who Would Not Yield
Hel's most famous appearance is in the tale of Baldr. When the shining god was slain and came down to her realm, she received him and seated him in honour. And when the gods sent Hermod to beg for his return, it was Hel who set the condition: she would release Baldr only if all things in all the world wept for him. When one giantess (Loki in disguise) refused to weep, Hel held to her word and kept Baldr among the dead. In this she showed her essential nature: not malicious, but utterly impartial and unbending — death keeping what death is owed, according to the bargain struck, neither moved by grief nor swayed by the gods.
The Queen of the Dead
Hel endures as the Norse personification of death and ruler of the dead — the grim half-corpse queen whose name became, through the conversion of the north, the English word “Hell,” though her cold and quiet realm was far from the fiery torment that word later came to mean. She embodies the Norse vision of death as a vast, shadowy continuation rather than punishment, ruled by an impartial queen who claims her due, gives the dead their lodging, and holds, unbending, to the bargains of death.
She is half living woman and half rotting corpse, queen of all who die quietly in their beds — and when she sets the price of a soul's return, not even the weeping of all the gods can move her to lower it.