Old Icelandic hel ‘world of the dead, the Dead-Goddess Hel’ in the Younger Edda and the comparison with the Elder Edda

Abstract

The purpose of this article is a comprehensive study of O.-Icel. hel ‘the underworld; the dead-goddess Hel’ in the Younger Edda, in the prose work of Snorri Sturluson (1222–1225) and a comparative analysis with the corresponding lexeme in the Elder Edda, the Old Icelandic poetic epic (the main manuscript of Codex Regius 2365 of the second half of the 13th century). The material of the Younger Edda allows reconstructing the semantic development of hel (locus) → Hel (its personification, owner). We can state the presence of fundamental similarities, found in this lexeme in the Elder and Younger Edda, manifested in various areas — in the common most frequent cases (gen. and dat.) and the syntactic function of direction realized by the verbs of motion, association with the bottom, synonymous predicates of the subject (to be, to live), extralinguistic details (gates). In the Younger Edda O.-Icel. hel is a hyponym for heimr, that is, it is one of the worlds along with Asgard, Midgard and the World of Giants, while in the Elder Edda this lexeme has the antonym of O.-Icel. heimr, that is, as the kingdom of death, it is opposed to one single concrete world of the living inhabited by people — Midgard, ʽthe middle enclosed spaceʼ. If in the Elder Edda the anthropocentric position dominates in the description of O.-Icel. hel, then theocentrism prevails in the Younger Edda.