Hela · Chapter 5 of 5
A Place Before a Person
A word first · A person later · Which way it ran
Sometimes the hole in the ground grows a face.
Scholarship raises a question the sources cannot settle: whether Hel began as a person at all. The Old Norse word hel means the grave, or the realm of the dead, and it descends from a root meaning to cover or conceal — the same root behind English hell. In the older poems the word usually names a place people go to rather than a woman who receives them, and the fully drawn figure with the hall and the two-coloured face is largely Snorri's. Personifications of this kind are common, and they tend to run in that direction.
- A word that covers
- A place, then a person
- A late portrait
Unlocks in-game at Ascension tier 4.
