Deity · Norse · c. 1270 CE
Hel
Also called Hela, Hell (per Wikidata)
Daughter of Loki, and ruler of the realm that gave English the word 'hell'. Hers is cold, and nobody in it is being punished.
Narrow source base
Snorri gives her a description, a hall and a jurisdiction: half livid and half flesh-coloured, thrown into Niflheim by Odin, and set over those who die of sickness and old age — which is to say almost everyone, since the halls of the slain take the rest. Her one negotiation is the Baldr episode, where she names a condition for releasing him, is cheated of it by a single refusal, and keeps him. The name is the more consequential half of the entry. Old English *hel* was the ordinary word for the abode of the dead, and it was the word available when Christian missionaries needed one — so the English Hell is her name. She did not become a demon so much as a place.
Identity
Where does the name come from?
Where it was actually worshipped
None. The place is named for her and the place is where you go, not where you worship.
A figure with temples and a figure that only ever existed on a page are different kinds of thing, and the difference is easy to lose once both are entries in a list.
At a glance
Vitals
Vitals
Also known as
- First attested
- The Prose Edda · c. 1220
- Rank
- Ruler of the Dead
- Pantheon
- Norse
- Order
- Norse
- Base of operations
- None. The place is named for her and the place is where you go, not where you worship.
- Era
- c. 1270 CE
- Traditions
- Norse
- Placed in
- The Nine Worlds
Traits
- Domain
- The dead who die of sickness and age
- Traditional form
- Half living flesh, half corpse-blue
Stats
Known connections
Chain of command
Identified with
2 attributed
What is it said to do?
Where these powers cluster
The 2 offices attributed to Hel, grouped by kind. Segment width is the share of powers falling in each category.
A bar dominated by one colour means a specialist; an even spread means a figure the sources credit with almost anything.
- martial1
- transformation1
martial
- Guards & Wardsno text cited
transformation
2 texts
Which texts say so?
When these texts were written
Each dot is one of the 2 texts that names Hel, placed at that text's approximate date.
A wide spread means the figure was carried across many centuries and traditions; a tight cluster means a single period produced the whole record.
2 texts, all inside a single century
Given a description, a hall and a jurisdiction: half-livid and half-flesh-coloured, thrown into Niflheim by Odin and granted authority over those who die of sickness and old age. She is also the one who sets the condition for releasing Baldr and is cheated of it — a ruler of the dead who keeps to a bargain while the gods do not.
Given authority over the ninth world, to apportion places to those sent to her.
Connections
What is it connected to?
Placement
Where does it sit in the hierarchies?
Answered from the sources
Common questions
Which texts mention Hel?
Is Hel the same as Hades?
What rank is Hel?
How else is Hel spelled?
What is Hel said to do?
How old is Hel?
Nearest in the corpus
If Hel is what you came for, these are next
Chosen by proximity rather than by popularity: the same pantheon first, then the same rank, then the same kind of figure.
Odin
Allfather · Norse
Hangs himself on the world tree for nine nights to win the runes — a sovereign god who is also a liar, a sorcerer and a chooser of the slain.
Thor
Thunderer · Norse
The defender who kills giants and will meet Jormungandr at Ragnarok. Whatever the poems give Odin, Thor was by far the more widely worshipped.
Loki
Trickster · Norse
Companion of the Aesir and their eventual destroyer — a figure whose slide toward the demonic is visible within the surviving texts themselves.
Fenrir
The Bound Wolf · Norse
Loki's son, bound by a fetter made of impossible things at the cost of Tyr's hand, and fated to kill Odin when the binding fails.
Freyja
Lady of the Vanir · Norse
Goddess of love and of sorcery who takes half the slain — the other half, not Odin's, which is rarely remembered.
Jormungandr
World Serpent · Norse
The serpent that rings the world and bites its own tail — the Norse entry in the chaos-serpent pattern that runs from Tiamat to Leviathan.
The books behind Hel
Every claim on this profile is attributed to one of these. They are public domain, listed oldest first, and each links to a full text where one is freely available.
The Prose Edda
Snorri Sturluson; tr. Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur · c. 1220 · Old Norse
Read The Prose Edda in full ↗Cover: Public domain · Unknown author · Wikimedia file page
The Poetic Edda
Anonymous; compiled in Iceland · 13th c., from older oral material · Old Norse
Read The Poetic Edda in full ↗Cover: Public domain · The Elder or Poetic Edda; commonly known as Sæmund's Edda. Edited and translated with… · Wikimedia file page
Corpus last revised 29 August 2026. A reference site’s credibility rests on being maintained, so this is the date the sourced records last changed — not the date the page was rebuilt.