A Curious Thing about Hell

I've finished the initial cycle of my romantic novel. The heroin's past life has been hammered out, and her husband has been laid to rest. With the story set in Norse mythology, I had to look into that religion's take on the afterlife. I learned that there was not only one Viking heaven, but two. I've also learned a few things about Hel, also known as Helheim.

The sources are conflicting on the subject. However, old sources indicate that Hel is not at all like Christian hell. The link between Hel and Christian hell is something that was introduced by Christian missionaries as they moved north, into territories where Norse mythology was practiced as religion.

The original belief was based on the idea that the afterlife takes place underground, in a realm where life goes on pretty much as it did on Earth. This realm, where everyone goes is what they called Hel, and there was nothing particularly sad or terrible about it. It wasn't some punishment for past sins. Whatever character a person had while alive continued in the afterlife.

This means that lost souls. The sad lot that never manage to see anything good in life, remain lost soles in the hereafter, and it is this group of people that the goddess of the underworld, also called Hel, bring together as an army that will eventually battle other gods at the end of times. This image is what Christian missionaries expanded and elaborated on in order to convince people that all of Hel is like this. However, this is a demonization of the original belief, where lost souls were only a tiny bit of Hel's enormous realm.

Furthermore, there were alternatives to Hel. People went to Folkvanger and Valhalla as well. There was also a place called Alfheim, which appears to have been a popular destination among believers. But you couldn't get to any of these places without first going to Hel.

Christian missionaries used a demonized version of Hel in order to explain the Christian idea of hell and eternal damnation. The word Hel was thus converted into the word hell, which we now use to mean what the Christians had in mind. This worked well in England. However, when they went to Scandinavia, they had to up their game, because the word hell means good luck in Scandinavian languages. Besides, people rather liked the idea of a cosy warm place underground. It was very much what they were having in mind as Hel anyway.

The missionaries had to give up on the word hell and invent a new word. That word is helvete. Hell is to this day used to mean good luck. We wish all our friends 'hell og lykke' in their lives, which translates to 'good luck and happiness'.

Another curious thing about the old belief system is that it was generally believed that spirits of our forefathers could be brought back to Earth by naming a child after the forefather in question. If that forefather had been to Alfheim, the realm of elves, the child would grow up to be in part an elf. The whole afterlife thing was something floating and cyclical. Spirits went to the various places that existed for the dead and they could come back and bring some of that with them.

The idea that the Christian vision of what the afterlife looks like is similar to pagan tradition is wrong. Norse mythology has nine realms, and spirits travel between all these places. When we die, we first go to Hel, and from there we move on to wherever else we want to go, or we simply hang around in Hel, living our lives as before.

Stone ship graveyard

By User:Berig - User:Berig. Transferred from en.wp, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link