Let Hel Hold What She Has

Happy Halloween! Wells of Wyrd is back on the air and what better way to celebrate than to honor the patroness of Hel herself.

Writing & Research:

Dustin Howard

https://www.dthbooks.com/

Narration & Additional Research:

Camden Mauer

Music:

Christopher Pinar-Ríndon
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For resources and more information, you can visit us at wellofwyrd.com or follow us on all platforms @wellsofwyrd. Listen to next episode wherever you listen to podcasts every other Friday.

Got a question or something to share? Leave us a comment or email us: wellsofwyrd@gmail.com

Transcript

Hi, Camden here. First, I wanted to say thank you to everybody who’s been listening to the podcast since I’ve been away. After some reflection and collaboration, Wells of Wyrd is back, and I’m excited for you to see the new and improved podcast. Let us begin.

The Eddas tell of three children born to Loki and the giantess Angrboða.
One a serpent, one a wolf, and a girl they named Hel.

Her siblings are well known:
Jörmungandr, the Midgard Serpent who encircles the world, and
Fenrir, the monstrous wolf fated to devour Odin at Ragnarök.

But Hel… Hel was different.

From the cradle, she was strange. The Eddas describe her as half-living, half-dead. One side of her face pallid with youth, the other dark and decayed.

She was not born broken. She was born balanced. One foot in the living, one in the beyond.

She was not vast like the serpent or violent like the wolf.
She was quiet. Observing. Unavoidable.

Even the gods were afraid of her.

The All-Father, Odin, summoned the child before his throne.
He looked into her mismatched face and saw the prophecy that foretold their demise.

Then he did what all kings do when confronted with inevitability:
He tried to contain it, to avoid it. And Odin banished the three siblings entirely.

He cast Jörmungandr into the sea.
Bound Fenrir in impossible chains.
And Hel?
He hurled her into the deep, beneath the roots of Yggdrasil, and gave her dominion over those slain by time and disease, not the valor of battle.

He gave her a realm, not out of mercy, but convenience.

Hel’s domain lies in the shadows of the world-tree, far beneath Midgard. She became the ruler of a world called by many names:
Helheim, Niflheim, the Mist World.

Not a queen of glory.
Not a chooser of the slain.
But a quiet sovereign of the forgotten dead.

In it stands her hall. In her hall
Her knife is called Famine.
Her dish, Hunger.
Her bed, Sickbed.
Two servants walked her corridors: Ganglati and Ganglöt, the slow ones.
They never spoke. They never hurried. In Hel’s kingdom, there was no reason to rush.

Niflheim was not the golden Valhalla of Odin’s chosen warriors.
Nor was it the field of Freyja’s fallen.

It was the land of all the rest, and the dead came to her in endless procession.

The mothers who died in childbirth, the elders who slipped away in sleep, the sick, the forgotten, the quiet. They arrived without fanfare. Without song.
Hel does not choose them; she receives them.

Without judgment,
without punishment.
There are no trials in her realm. Death is the only requirement.

And she keeps the dead like a librarian keeps books:
organized, unburned, and unseen by those who no longer read.

Content as Odin was that Hel should be banished and forgotten,

Fate, as it is wont to do, had other plans,

and there came a moment when the worlds turned their eyes to her gates.

The god Baldr, beloved by all, bright and gentle, had died.
Not in battle, but by trickery. By a spear of mistletoe tricked by Loki’s scheming.

Without the honor of death in battle, Baldr joined the ranks of Hel’s dead. Frigg, stricken with grief over the loss of her beloved Baldr, begged the Aesir for help.

Hermóðr, brother to Baldr, rode nine days and nights on Sleipnir, the eight-legged horse, through darkness and mist to descend into Niflheim. To plead with Hel for his brother’s return.

He begged her:
Release Baldr to the land of the living.
The gods mourn him.
The world mourns him.

Hel listened.
And then she offered a condition:

“If all things in the world weep for Baldr,” she said,
“alive or dead, then he shall return to the living.
But if any refuse to cry, he will remain with me.”

It was not mercy, but neither was it malice.
It was law.
And law is what Hel understood better than any god.

So the message went forth, through sky and sea and soil, and all the world wept.

The trees shed their leaves in mourning.
Iron rusted from sorrow.
Men and beasts cried out until even stones cracked from grief.

Every living thing bent its heart toward the dead god.
All but one.

High in a cave, a woman called Þökk sat unmoved.
Some say it was Loki in disguise.
Some say it was despair itself wearing human shape.

Þökk did not weep. She only said:

“Let Hel hold what she has.”

And in that refusal, the bargain was broken.

The doors of Hel’s hall shut once more.
Baldr stayed among the dead, bright and still.

And above, in the shining halls of Asgard, a silence spread; the silence of gods who could not undo their own fear.

The old kept coming; the fevered, the frail, the tired.
She gave them a place to rest. Not paradise. Not torment. Just rest.

And slowly, the realm that had begun in exile became something like peace.

But even peace cannot escape prophecy.
There would come a day when the wolf’s chains would break, and the serpent would rise from the sea, and Loki himself would march to war.

On that day, Hel would open her gates.
And all of her people…the quiet, the forgotten, the countless dead…would follow.

They would not roar like warriors.
They would not scream for vengeance.
They would walk.
Soft-footed. Endless.

A tide of silence against a burning sky.

That is the part of the prophecy the gods fear most: not the monsters, not the flames, but the uncountable steps of those they never saw fit to remember.

When all of Hel’s people rise, the world will finally understand the cost of forgetting the common dead.

And what of Hel herself?

The myths do not say she falls.
They do not say she dies.
They say that after the fires die down, and the new world grows green again, Baldr returns.

Whether Hel released him or the world simply turned around her, no one knows.

And perhaps that is her final, hidden gift:
In a world that exalts the loud, the glorious, and the violent,
Hel gives dignity to the ordinary end.

She does not need a throne of gold.
She has one of stone.
And the silence that sits beside it
has lasted longer than any mead-hall song.

In Norse myth, even the gods die.
Even glory fades.

But the quiet realm below the roots
remains.

Where Famine sets the table.
Where Hunger waits to serve.
Where the gates are closed to glory,
but open to truth.

Hel sits there still.
Not in malice.
Not in mourning.
But in balance.

And when the world ends,
she will open the door.

For every hero’s feast,
there must be a hall for those
who died with no one watching.

That hall is hers.

She is Hel.
And she rules what she is given.

Today’s episode was written and researched by Dustin Howard with additional research by Camden Mauer. The music of Wells of Wyrd was written and performed by Christopher Pinar. 

For resources and more information, you can visit us at wellofwyrd.com or follow us on all platforms @wellsofwyrd. That’s wyrd with a y. You can hear the next episode wherever you listen to podcasts. Let us know in the comments which myth we should tackle next. 

See you around wyrdos.