Hel

Hel is the death that is not glory. Loki's daughter, half flesh-coloured and half blue-black, Odin cast her down into the cold below the worlds and gave her dominion over the nine realms of the dead — but only over a certain kind of dead: those who die of sickness and old age, not the sword-slain who go to Odin's hall. She is the keeper of the unchosen end, the one the warrior-culture most feared, and her household is a grim allegory of it: her hall is Sleet-Cold, her dish is Hunger, her knife is Famine, her threshold the Pit of Stumbling. When the gods sent to ransom bright Baldr from her, she set the one condition — that all things weep for him — and let a single dry-eyed giantess keep him forever. Hel does not rage or scheme; she simply holds what is sent to her, lowering and fierce and unbargained-with: the North's face of the death that has nothing heroic about it at all.