Hallo, my lovely little heathens! With Samhain fast approaching, and so many wonderful topics coming to light, I think it’s time we had another conversation about one of the most misunderstood figures in Norse mythology. Today, we’re talking about Hel, daughter of Loki and Angrboða, ruler of the dead, and the subject of an awful lot of nonsense about how Óðinn supposedly cast her away because she was either too hideous for him to look upon or a danger because of a dark prophecy hanging over her head. There is a tendency to relegate her to the role of an evil being cast down by the leader of the gods. Trust me, I’ve seen the images. Honestly, I think we’re looking at another Christian gloss laid over a much more complex story. Hel has been cast in the role of Lucifer, exiled by Yahweh for rebellion. Except that this neat little framework of a supreme deity casting out an evil being is not something we can simply impose on pre-Christian heathen beliefs as though it were universally understood. We need to be careful about assigning roles to beings and deities that may owe more to later religious interpretations than to those earlier traditions themselves.

Now, if you’ve been following my Ramblings for a while, you might remember my story about Týr and Fenrir, and how fear of a prophecy can become the very thing that brings it to pass. Hel’s story gives us another opportunity to examine that same fear, but I want to approach it from a slightly different direction. What if we’ve been looking at her position all wrong?

Let’s begin with something that often gets lost in the retelling. In Gylfaginning, Snorri tells us that Óðinn sent the gods to retrieve Loki’s children from Jötunheimr after prophecies warned that they would bring great misfortune to the gods. Now, we don’t know their ages, but I personally imagine these children were still quite young, perhaps in their early to mid teens at the oldest. Yes, there was a prophecy, but in my understanding of the relationships and obligations reflected in these stories, the Æsir were not simply a collection of monsters who hurt children because they disliked their parents. I cannot think of another instance in the existing myths where the gods actually caused some sort of harm against children. No, some rules are not broken – after all there were responsibilities to consider, even when fear and self-preservation entered the picture.

We get a glimpse of their actions through the account of a Christian-era scholar. Jörmungandr was cast into the sea, Fenrir was kept among the gods, and Hel was cast down to Niflheimr. Yet what often gets glossed over is what came of those decisions. Specifically to the sole daughter of Loki that we have mentioned. According to Snorri, Óðinn gave Hel authority over the dead across the nine worlds, where she would receive those who came to her after dying of sickness or old age.

Now, I want you to sit with that for a moment. If the intention was simply to banish Hel, why establish her in such an important position? Why place her in a position where the living and the dead would have reason to acknowledge her authority? And here is the line of questioning I find particularly interesting: did Óðinn actually possess the authority to grant her dominion over the dead, or is that the framework through which Snorri chose to explain a much older belief in terms his audience would tolerate? What if Óðinn did not create Hel’s authority at all? What if he recognized a connection that was already hers and provided a way for her to exercise it? And what if the story is more complicated than a powerful male god rejecting an unpleasant-looking, prophecy-ridden niece?

To explore that possibility, we need to consider the world in which these stories took shape, before Snorri recorded them. Our evidence is fragmentary, and we cannot reconstruct every pre-Christian belief from later Icelandic writings. Nevertheless, the surviving traditions give us glimpses of a religious world in which the dead were not necessarily forgotten, discarded, or regarded as inherently evil. Relationships with the dead could remain important to the living, and ritual observances such as Dísablót and Álfablót remind us that the unseen world was not simply something to fear. It was also a world with which people maintained relationships, including relationships with those who had passed from one world to the next. Although we cannot claim that every one of these observances was exclusively about ancestors, they do help us consider a religious worldview in which the unseen was woven into the life of the community. The relationship between the living and the unseen was more complicated than a simple division between good and evil. Which allows us to bring Loki into it.

In Lokasenna, Loki reminds Óðinn that they once mingled their blood and that Óðinn had promised not to drink unless a drink was brought for them both. Whatever else we make of their relationship, Loki invokes a bond that Óðinn cannot simply pretend never existed. Their connection carried obligations, and the poem shows Óðinn responding by having a place made for Loki at the feast, thus acknowledging that the bond exists. Let’s broaden that scope. What if we look at Loki’s children through that same lens of relationship obligation? What are the ties that bind them? In my personal interpretation, the blood bond makes Óðinn something much closer to an uncle to all of Loki’s children than a distant ruler passing judgment on someone else’s children. Loki is not merely another being whose offspring happen to frighten the Æsir. He is someone with whom Óðinn has a profound bond, one that Loki himself calls upon when his place among the gods is challenged.

The surviving sources do not specifically tell us that Óðinn owed Loki’s children an inheritance through their blood-brother bond. It is an interpretation, not a claim that we’ve uncovered a missing passage from the Eddas. Yet kinship, fostering, marriage alliances, and the obligations created by oaths give us a way to imagine how these relationships might have been understood in a time very different than our own. In a society where relationships were bound together by more than affection, an obligation did not necessarily disappear simply because fulfilling it became inconvenient. Imagine, for a moment, that Óðinn felt responsible for the children of the man with whom he had sworn such a bond. The prophecies frightened him, certainly, and he wanted to limit the danger they represented. Yet perhaps he also had responsibilities he could not ignore without upsetting the balance of his own societal relationships.

Look at what happens to the three children through this lens. Fenrir remains among the gods, with Týr stepping forward to take responsibility for him in a relationship that I interpret as resembling fostering. Jörmungandr is placed in the waters surrounding Miðgarðr, eventually encircling the world. In my reading, his position can be understood not merely as confinement, but as a protective role connected to the very world he surrounds like the ancient symbol of the Ouroboros. Hel, meanwhile, becomes associated with a realm of her own in which she is the sole ruler along with dominion over the dead who come to her.

Each child occupies a significant place in the structure of the worlds, even as the gods attempt to manage the danger they believe the children represent. That doesn’t erase the fear, and it doesn’t mean every decision made by the Æsir was kind or fair. It does, however, leave room for something other than simple rejection. We often see in the myths across pantheons, women have been diminished – their agency and power either removed or lessened – in favor of men. This isn’t an attempt to bash men, far from it. It’s an observation in my 24+ years of pagan practice of the need to review the lore from many different angles to notice what is there, and perhaps far more importantly, what isn’t there. The goddesses of our lore were much more prominent than we have been led to believe, otherwise there would be no mention at all. It becomes our responsibility as the current caretakers of that lore to ensure they are remembered.

In the case of Hel, we need to strip away that concept of throwing her away to avoid bad things and see it for what it was: a young girl tied to a prophecy who was removed from her home and family. Then, out of fear, she was sent even further away. Where, in any of that situation, does she represent evil or bad? Óðinn was put in the impossible situation of fulfilling his obligations to a man with whom he had sworn a blood-oath or fulfilling his obligations to protect the people to whom he was responsible. Perhaps, upon meeting young Hel, he realized he could do both in one action. Recognize who she was, respect her agency and authority, and still remove someone viewed as a threat. It wasn’t kind, she was a little girl after all. But the alternative might have been far worse had she been left for others among the Æsir to handle. Now, he at least had an option, one that would allow the glimpses of the future he had received thus far be more manageable if handled the right way.

So, who was the “villain” then? Hel for circumstances of her birth and a prophecy? Or Óðinn for sending a little girl far away from her family to protect his people? Fear, it seems, gives prophecy the teeth it needs to satisfy its hunger.