"For the perjurer and the secret murderer Nastrond existed, a place of torment and punishment—the strand of the dead—filled with foulness, peopled with poisonous serpents, dark, cold, and gloomy; the kingdom of Hel was Hades, the invisible, the world of shadows; Nastrond was what we call Hell."

Kelly further contends that as "the heaven of the (Aryan) Pitris is often called 'the world of good deed, the world of the righteous,' and as they themselves were spirits of light and ministers of all good men, there is strong reason for inferring, although the fact is nowhere expressly stated, that the inhabitants of the opposite world became spirits of darkness, and confederates of all the evil powers." He adds,—"If this conjecture prove to be well founded, it will have brought to light another remarkable instance of the continuity of Aryan tradition."

The Rev. G. W. Cox, however, scarcely indorses this view of the Gothic Hell and Devil. He says,—"Hel had been like Persephonê, the queen of the unseen land,—in the ideas of the northern tribes, a land of bitter cold and icy walls. She now became not the queen of Niflheim, but Niflheim itself, while her abode, though gloomy enough, was not wholly destitute of material comforts. It became the Hell where the old man hews wood for the Christmas fire, and where the Devil in his eagerness to buy the flitch of bacon yields up the marvellous quern which is 'good to grind almost anything.' It was not so pleasant, indeed, as Heaven, or the old Valhalla, but it was better to be there than shut out in the outer cold beyond its padlocked gates. But more particularly the Devil was a being who under pressure of hunger might be drawn into acting against his own interest, in other words he might be outwitted, and this character of a poor or stupid devil is almost the only one exhibited in Teutonic legends. In fact, as Professor Max Müller remarks, the Germans, when they had been 'indoctrinated with the idea of a real devil, the Semitic Satan or Diabolus, treated him in the most good-humoured manner;' nor is it easy to resist Dr. Dasent's conclusion that 'no greater proof can be given of the small hold which the Christian Devil has taken of the Norse mind than the heathen aspect under which he constantly appears, and the ludicrous way in which he is always outwitted.'" Mr. Cox adds, in a note, that it has "been said of Southey that he could never think of the devil without laughing. This is but saying that he had the genuine humour of our Teutonic ancestors."

Dasent, in his "Popular Tales from the Norse," says,—"The Christian notion of Hell is that of a place of heat, for in the East, whence Christianity came, heat is often an intolerable torment, and cold, on the other hand, everything that is pleasant and delightful. But to the dwellers in the North heat brings with it sensations of joy and comfort, and life without fire has a dreary outlook; so their Hel ruled in a cold region over those who were cowards by implication, while the mead-cup went round and huge logs blazed and crackled in Valhalla for the brave and beautiful who had dared to die on the field of battle. But under Christianity the extremes of heat and cold have met, and Hel, the cold, uncomfortable goddess, is now our Hell, where flames and fires abound, and where the devils abide in everlasting flame."

How grandly has Shakspere expressed the various traditionary forms respecting the lost soul's lodgment or condition after death, in "Measure for Measure." In act 3, scene 1, Claudio exclaims:—

Ay, but to die and go we know not where,
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those, that lawless and incertain thoughts
Imagine howling! 'tis too horrible!
The wearied and most loathed worldly life,
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature, is a paradise
To what we fear of death.

It is a common superstition yet that the ghosts of persons, murdered or otherwise, not buried in consecrated ground, cannot rest, but must wander about in search of the means of Christian sepulture. This superstition obtained amongst the Greeks and Latins. The ghosts of unburied bodies, not possessing the obolus or fee due to Charon, the ferryman of the Styx or Acheron, were unable to obtain a lodging or place of rest. They were, therefore, compelled to wander about the banks of the river for a hundred years, when the Portitor or "ferryman of hell" passed them over, in forma pauperis. Hence the sacred nature of the duty of surviving relatives and friends under the most trying circumstances. The celebrated tragedy of Antigone, by Sophocles, owes its chief interest and pathos to the popular faith on this subject.

Brand on the authority of Aubrey, states that, amongst the vulgar in Yorkshire, it was believed, "and, perhaps, is in part still," that, after a person's death, the soul went over Whinney Moor; and till about 1624, at the funeral, a woman came (like a Præfica) and sung the following song:—

This ean night, this ean night,
Every night and awle,
Fire and fleet (water) and candle-light,
And Christ receive thy sawle.

When thou from hence doest pass away,
Every night and awle,
To Whinny-Moor [silly poor] thou comest at last,
And Christ receive thy sawle.