TEUTONIC MYTHOLOGY. - Centrostudirpinia.it

BAHANA. HELLIA. 313
passages her blackness alone is made a subject of comparison
: lldr
sem Hel, Nialss. 117. Fornm. sog. 3, 188 ; conf. Heljar skinn for
complexion of deathly hue, Landnamab. 2, 19. Nialss. cap. 96.
Fornald. sog. 2, 59. 60 ;
x death is black and gloomy. Her dwelling
is deep down in the darkness of the ground, under a root of the
tree Yggdrasill, in Niflheim, the innermost part of which is there
fore called Niflhel, there is her court (rann), there her halls, Ssem.
6 b 44 a 94 a . Sn. 4. Her platter is named liungr, her knife sultr,
synonymous terms to denote her insatiable greed. The dead go
down to her, fara til Heljar, strictly those only that have died of
sickness or old age, not those fallen in fight, who people Valhalla.
Her personality has pretty well disappeared in such phrases as i
hel sla, drepa, berja i hel, to smite into hell, send to Hades ; % helju
vera, be in Hades, be dead, Fornald. sog. 1, 233. Out of this has
arisen in the modern dialects an altogether impersonal and distorted
term, Swed. ihjdl, Dan. ihiel, to death. 2 These languages now
express the notion of the nether world only by a compound, Swed.
helvete, Dan. helvede, i.e., the ON. Mviti (supplicium infernale),
OHG. hellawizi, MHG. hellewize. One who is drawing his last
breath is said in ON. liggja milli heims oc heljar (to lie betwixt
home and hell), to be on his way from this world to the other.
The unpitying nature of the Eddie Hel is expressly emphasized ;
what she once has, she never gives back : haldi Hel tyvi er hefir, Sn.
68 ; hefir nu Hel, Ssem. 257 a , like the wolf in the apologue (Eeinhart
xxxvi), for she is of wolfish nature and extraction ; to the
wolf on the other hand a hellish throat is attributed (see SuppL).
Two lays in the Edda describe the way to the lower world, the
1 The ancients also painted Demeter, as the wrathful earth-goddess, black
509 the black
(Pans. 8, 42. O. Miiller s Eumenides 168, conf. Archfeol. p.
Demeter at
Phigalia), and sometimes even her daughter Persephone, the fair
l
maid doomed to the underworld : furva Proserpina, Hor. Od. 2, 13 (Censorin.
De die nat. c. 17). Black Aphrodite (Melanis) is spoken of by Pausanias 2, 2.
8, 6. 9, 27 and by Athenseus bk. 13 we know ; the black Diana of Ephesus,
and that in the Mid. Ages black Madonnas were both painted and carved, the
Holy Virgin appearing then as a sorrowing goddess of earth or night such ; at
Furia dwelling in Tartarus is also represented both as black and as half white
half black.
2
Swed. has more, correctly ihael, i.e., ihal (Fred, af Normandie 1299.
1356. 1400. 1414). In Ostgotalagen p. 8, one reading has already ihieell for
of the term.
ihsel ; they no longer grasped the meaning