Hel (the realm of the dead)

Hel is the cold underworld of the unchosen dead — the shadowed realm below all the worlds, ruled by Loki's daughter of the same name, where go those who die of sickness and old age rather than by the sword. It is the death the warrior-culture most feared: not Odin's bright hall of the slain, but a place of sleet and hunger reached by a long road downward and a hall whose every furnishing has a grim name. It is to Hel that Odin rides down on Sleipnir to wake a dead seeress and learn the fate of his son Baldr; and it is in Hel that Baldr himself is held when a single dry-eyed giantess refuses to weep him free. Hel is the Norse image of the end that has no glory in it — final, cold, and bargained with only by the gods themselves, and even then in vain.