Niflhel, that is, down into the ninth world. And it is here, in this most infernal pit, that the palace is named Anguish; the table, Famine; the waiters, Slowness and Delay; the threshold, Precipice, and the bed, Care. It is here Hel is so livid and ghastly pale that her very looks inspire horror.
Hel's horse has three feet. Hel-shoes were tied on to the feet of the dead, even though they went to Valhal.
Our English word hell is connected with the goddess Hel,[1] and to kill is in Norse at slaa ihel (i-Hel). The faith in this goddess is not yet perfectly eradicated from the minds of the people. Her dog is yet heard barking outside of houses as a warning that death is near. She wanders about from place to place as a messenger of death. In the story of Olaf Geirstada-alf it is a large ox, that goes from farm to farm, and at his breath people sink down dead. In the popular mind in Norway this messenger of death is sometimes thought to be a three-footed goat, and at other times a white three-footed horse. To see it is a sure sign of death. When a person has recovered from a dangerous illness, it is said that he has given Death a bushel of oats, for her wants must be supplied, and Hel wandering about in the guise of a goat, ox or horse, may accept oats as a compromise.
It may also be noticed here, that the so-called Black Plague, or Black Death, that ravaged Norway as well as many other European countries about the middle of the fourteenth century, assumed in the minds of the Norsemen the form of an old hag (Thok, Hel, Loke), going through the realm from parish to parish with a rake and a broom. In some parishes she used the rake, and there a few were spared; in other parishes she used the
- ↑ They are both derived from the Anglo-Saxon hélan or helian, to cover, to conceal; compare the English to hill.
