Editing Hel (mythological being) (section)

==Scholarly reception==
[[Image:Treated NKS hermodr.jpg|thumb|upright|An 18th-century ''Prose Edda'' manuscript illustration featuring Hermóðr upon [[Sleipnir]] (left), [[Baldr]] (upper right), and Hel (lower right). Details include but are not limited to Hel's dish "[[hunger]]" and the knife "[[famine]]".]]
[[Image:Heimdal verlangt die Rückkehr Iduns aus der Unterwelt.jpg|thumb|upright|"[[Heimdallr]] desires [[Iðunn]]'s return from the Underworld" (1881) by [[Carl Emil Doepler]].]]

===Seo Hell===
The ''[[Old English Gospel of Nicodemus]]'', preserved in two manuscripts from the 11th century, contains a female figure referred to as ''Seo hell'' who engages in [[flyting]] with [[Satan]] and tells him to leave her dwelling (Old English ''ut of mynre onwununge''). Regarding Seo Hell in the ''Old English Gospel of Nicodemus'', Michael Bell states that "her vivid personification in a dramatically excellent scene suggests that her gender is more than grammatical, and invites comparison with the Old Norse underworld goddess Hel and the [[Holda|Frau Holle]] of German folklore, to say nothing of underworld goddesses in other cultures" yet adds that "the possibility that these genders ''are'' merely grammatical is strengthened by the fact that an Old Norse version of Nicodemus, possibly translated under English influence, personifies Hell in the neutral (Old Norse ''þat helvíti'')".<ref name=BELL263>Bell (1983:263).</ref>

===''Bartholomeus saga postola''===
The [[Old Norse]] ''[[Bartholomeus saga postola]]'', an account of the life of [[Saint Bartholomew]] dating from the 13th century, mentions a "Queen Hel". In the story, a devil is hiding within a pagan idol, and bound by Bartholomew's spiritual powers to acknowledge himself and confess, the devil refers to [[Jesus]] as the one which "made war on Hel our queen" (Old Norse ''heriaði a Hel drottning vara''). "Queen Hel" is not mentioned elsewhere in the saga.<ref name=BELL263-264>Bell (1983:263–264).</ref>

Michael Bell says that while Hel "might at first appear to be identical with the well-known pagan goddess of the Norse underworld" as described in chapter 34 of ''Gylfaginning'', "in the combined light of the Old English and Old Norse versions of ''Nicodemus'' she casts quite a different a shadow", and that in  ''Bartholomeus saga postola'' "she is clearly the queen of the Christian, not pagan, underworld".<ref name=BELL265>Bell (1983:265).</ref>

===Origins and development===
[[Jacob Grimm]] described Hel as an example of a "half-goddess": "one who cannot be shown to be either wife or daughter of a god, and who stands in a dependent relation to higher divinities", and argued that "half-goddesses" stand higher than "half-gods" in Germanic mythology.<ref name=GRIMM397>Grimm (1882:397).</ref> Grimm regarded Hel (whom he refers to here as ''Halja'', the theorized [[Proto-Germanic]] form of the term) as essentially an "image of a greedy, unrestoring, female deity" and theorized that "the higher we are allowed to penetrate into our antiquities, the less hellish and more godlike may ''Halja'' appear". He compared her role, her black color, and her name to "the [[Hinduism|Indian]] [[Bhavani]], who travels about and bathes like [[Nerthus]] and [[Holda]], but is likewise called ''[[Kali]]'' or ''[[Mahakali]]'', the great ''black'' goddess" and concluded that "''Halja'' is one of the oldest and commonest conceptions of our heathenism".<ref name=GRIMM315>Grimm (1882:315).</ref> He theorized that the [[Helhest]], a three-legged horse that in Danish folklore roams the countryside "as a harbinger of plague and pestilence", was originally the steed of the goddess Hel, and that on this steed Hel roamed the land "picking up the dead that were her due". He also says that a wagon was once ascribed to Hel.<ref name=GRIMM314>Grimm (1882:314).</ref>

In her 1948 work on death in Norse mythology and religion, ''The Road to Hel'', [[Hilda Ellis Davidson]] argued that the description of Hel as a goddess in surviving sources appeared to be literary personification, the word ''hel'' generally being "used simply to signify death or the grave", which she states "naturally lends itself to personification by poets". While noting that "whether this personification has originally been based on a belief in a goddess of death called Hel [was] another question", she stated that she did not believe the surviving sources gave any reason to believe so, while they included various other examples of "supernatural women" who "seem to have been closely connected with the world of death, and were pictured as welcoming dead warriors". She suggested that the depiction of Hel "as a goddess" in ''Gylfaginning'' "might well owe something to these".<ref name="ELLIS90">Ellis (1968:84).</ref>

In a later work (1998), Davidson wrote that the description of Hel found in chapter 33 of ''Gylfaginning'' "hardly suggests a goddess", but that "in the account of Hermod's ride to Hel later in ''Gylfaginning'' (49)", Hel "[speaks] with authority as ruler of the underworld" and that from her realm "gifts are sent back to [[Frigg]] and [[Fulla]] by Balder's wife [[Nanna (Norse deity)|Nanna]] as from a friendly kingdom". She posited that Snorri may have "earlier turned the goddess of death into an allegorical figure, just as he made Hel, the underworld of [[Shade (mythology)|shades]], a place 'where wicked men go,' like the Christian Hell (''Gylfaginning'' 3)". She then, like Grimm, compared Hel to [[Kali]]:

<blockquote>On the other hand, a goddess of death who represents the horrors of slaughter and decay is something well known elsewhere; the figure of Kali in India is an outstanding example. Like Snorri's Hel, she is terrifying to in appearance, black or dark in colour, usually naked, adorned with severed heads or arms or the corpses of children, her lips smeared with blood. She haunts the battlefield or cremation ground and squats on corpses. Yet for all this she is "the recipient of ardent devotion from countless devotees who approach her as their mother" [...].<ref name=DAVIDSON178>Davidson (1998:178) quoting 'the recipient ...' from Kinsley (1989:116).</ref></blockquote>

Davidson further compared Hel to early attestations of the [[Irish mythology|Irish]] goddesses [[Badb]] (described in ''The Destruction of Da Choca's Hostel'' as dark in color, with a large mouth, wearing a dusky mantle, and with gray hair falling over her shoulders, or, alternatively, "as a red figure on the edge of the ford, washing the chariot of a king doomed to die") and [[Morrígan|the Morrígan]]. She concluded that, in these examples, "here we have the fierce destructive side of death, with a strong emphasis on its physical horrors, so perhaps we should not assume that the gruesome figure of Hel is wholly Snorri's literary invention".<ref name=DAVIDSON179>Davidson (1998:179).</ref>

[[John Lindow]] stated that most details about Hel, as a figure, are not found outside of Snorri's writing in ''Gylfaginning'', and that when older skaldic poetry "says that people are 'in' rather than 'with' Hel, we are clearly dealing with a place rather than a person, and this is assumed to be the older conception". He theorizes that the noun and place ''Hel'' likely originally simply meant "grave", and that "the personification came later".<ref name="LINDOW172">Lindow (1997:172).</ref> Lindow also drew a parallel between the personified Hel's banishment to the underworld and the binding of Fenrir as part of a recurring theme of the [[bound monster]], where an enemy of the gods is bound but destined to break free at Ragnarok.<ref name=LINDOW82-83>Lindow (2001:82–83).</ref> [[Rudolf Simek]] similarly stated that the figure of Hel is "probably a very late personification of the underworld Hel", that "on the whole nothing speaks in favour of there being a belief in Hel in pre-Christian times", and noted that "the first scriptures using the goddess Hel are found at the end of the 10th and in the 11th centuries". He characterized the allegorical description of Hel's house in ''Gylfaginning'' as "clearly&nbsp;... in the Christian tradition".<ref name="SIMEK138">Simek (2007:138).</ref> However, elsewhere in the same work, Simek cites an argument made by {{ill|Karl Hauck|de}} that one of three figures appearing together on Migration Period [[Bracteate#Typology|B-bracteate]]s is to be interpreted as Hel.<ref name=SIMEK44>Simek (2007:44).</ref>