The Journal of the Archivist of the Unseen
A richly illustrated guide to Hel, Gjallarbrú, and Norse ideas of the afterlife.
Written at Faulkenmire, in the north stacks, on a night of sleet, by a lamp that would not burn steady.
The cold came into the house tonight before the weather did. I found it waiting in the north stacks, where the Scandinavian volumes are shelved, and where someone had pulled a single book half out of its row as a finger is laid on a word. It was a nineteenth-century edition of Snorri Sturluson’s Edda, its spine split, open at the passage on the children of Loki. I sat with it under a lamp that would not burn quite steady. It is strange, after the last entry, to come so soon upon another figure painted blue.
Before anything else, the word. In Old Norse, hel is first of all a place: the realm of the dead, the hidden place under the earth. It is the same Germanic word that became the English “hell,” and philologists trace it to a root meaning to cover or to conceal, the root that also gives us “hall” and “helmet.” Hel was the place that hides. Only in some sources does the place have a mistress who bears its name, and here, fellow keeper of the uncatalogued, I must be careful, because nearly everything we know of her comes to us through Christian hands.
Our fullest portrait is Snorri’s, written in Iceland around 1220, more than two centuries after the island’s conversion. In his Gylfaginning, Hel is the daughter of Loki and the giantess Angrboða, sister to the wolf Fenrir and the World Serpent. Odin, warned that these children would bring ruin, cast Hel down into Niflheim and gave her authority over nine worlds, on the condition that she give lodging to all who were sent to her: those who died of sickness and old age. Snorri says she is half blue-black and half the color of flesh, and that she looks grim and stern. The Old Norse word is blár, which covered a range from dark blue to black, the color of a bruise, of cold, of a body some days dead.
Snorri furnishes her hall with a kind of cruel inventory, and every object is a symbol. Her hall is called Éljúðnir, often glossed as “sleet-damp” or “damp with storm.” Her dish is Hunger, her knife is Famine. Her servants are named for slowness. Her threshold is Falling-to-Peril, her bed is Sickbed, and its hangings are Gleaming Misfortune. Read as a whole, it is less a palace of torment than a portrait of a slow death, the death of the fevered and the old, drawn room by room. Whether the pagan Norse imagined her this way, or whether Snorri composed the list as a learned allegory, is something scholars still dispute. Some argue that the personified goddess is largely a medieval literary creation built upon the older idea of a place; others find her too firmly rooted in earlier poetry to be wholly invented. I cannot settle it, and I will not pretend to.
What I can say is that Hel was not, in most of the sources, the place of punishment that the English word came to mean. Valhalla was for the chosen slain; Hel, by Snorri’s account, was where most people went. The Icelandic sagas show the living preparing the dead for the journey. In Gisla saga, a man ties hel-shoes on a dead companion’s feet, saying he does not know how to tie them if these come loose. The road was long, and it was thought that the dead must walk it.
That road is where Hel meets my study of the far bank. When the god Baldr is killed, Snorri tells that his brother Hermóðr rides Odin’s horse Sleipnir nine nights through dark valleys to the river Gjöll and its bridge, Gjallarbrú, roofed with gleaming gold. A maiden named Móðguðr guards it. She tells him that five companies of dead men crossed the day before, yet the bridge rang louder under him alone; he has not the color of the dead. Here again is the river that divides the living from the dead, and the keeper at the crossing who knows the difference.
And here too is the grief that would stop the world. Hermóðr begs Hel to release Baldr. She sets a single condition: if all things in the world, alive and dead, will weep for him, he may return. Everything weeps, Snorri says, as frost weeps when it thaws, except one giantess in a cave, who answers that Hel should keep what she holds. Snorri adds that people believe the giantess was Loki in disguise. I thought of Demeter, who also bargained with the lord of the dead and won only a partial return. Hel’s terms are harder. She asks not for a season but for unanimity, and the world cannot give it.
I should note, as an outside observer, that the Norse gods are honored today by living communities of Heathen practice, for whom Hel is not a literary puzzle. I write only of texts and of what scholars make of them; I do not speak for those who keep her name in a living way.
Before I returned the Edda to its place, I marked the passage on the bridge with a slip of paper. When I looked again, the slip had been moved to the line where the maiden says the bridge rang louder under one living rider than under five companies of the dead.
— A.U., Faulkenmire
Catalogue References
Field Study No. VIII — The Other Side: The Otherworld, the Ferryman, and the River
Field Study No. XVI — The Grief That Stopped the World: Demeter
Further Studies
Abram, C. (2011). Myths of the pagan North: The gods of the Norsemen . Continuum.
Larrington, C. (Trans.). (2014). The Poetic Edda (Rev. ed.). Oxford University Press.
Lindow, J. (2001). Norse mythology: A guide to the gods, heroes, rituals, and beliefs . Oxford University Press.
Sturluson, S. (2005). The Prose Edda: Norse mythology (J. L. Byock, Trans.). Penguin Classics.
Editions and reprints vary; verify details against a library catalogue.
Uncatalogued
I have read the name of the river on the black-ribboned box a hundred times now, and only tonight did it occur to me that I have never once heard it spoken aloud.
This entry is preserved within the haunted archive of Wicked Dual, among the private papers of the Archivist of the Unseen.
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