This phrase fyr nágrindr nethan must have been a stereotyped eschatological term applied to a particular division, a particular realm in the lower world. In Lokasenna (str. 63), Thor says to Loke, after the latter has emptied his phials of rash insults upon the gods, that if he does not hold his tongue the hammer Mjolner shall send him to Hel fyr nágrindr nethan. Hel is here used in its widest sense, and this is limited by the addition of the words "below the Na-gates," so as to refer to a particular division of the lower world. As we find by the application of the phrase to Loke, this division is of such a character that it is intended to receive the foes of the Asas and the insulters of the gods.
The word Nagrind, which is always used in the plural, and accordingly refers to more than one gate of the kind, has as its first part nár (pl. náir), which means corpse, dead body. Thus Na-gates means Corpse-gates.
The name must seem strange, for it is not dead bodies, but souls, released from their bodies left on earth, which descend to the kingdom of death and get their various abodes there. How far our heathen ancestors had a more or less material conception of the soul is a question which it is not necessary to discuss here (see on this point No. 95). Howsoever they may have regarded it, the very existence of a Hades in their mythology demonstrates that they believed that a conscious and sentient element in man was in death separated from the body with which it had been united in life, and went down to the lower world. That the body from which this conscious, sentient element fled was not removed to Hades, but went in this upper earth to its disintegration, whether it was burnt or buried in a mound or sunk to the bottom of the sea, this our heathen ancestors knew just as well as we know it. The people of the stone-age already knew this.
The phrase Na-gates does not stand alone in our mythological eschatology. One of the abodes of torture lying within the Na-gate is called Nastrands (Nástrandir), and is described in Völuspa as filled with terrors. And the victims, which Nidhog, the winged demon of the lower world, there sucks, are called náir framgenga, "the corpses of those departed."
It is manifest that the word nár thus used cannot have its common meaning, but must be used in a special mythological sense, which had its justification and its explanation in the heathen doctrine in regard to the lower world.
It not unfrequently happens that law-books preserve ancient significations of words not found elsewhere in literature. The Icelandic law-book Grágás (ii. 185) enumerates four categories within which the word nár is applicable to a person yet living. Gallows-nár, can be called, even while living, the person who is hung; grave-nár, the person placed in a grave; skerry-nár or rock-nár may, while yet alive, he be called who has been exposed to die on a skerry or rock. Here the word nár is accordingly applied to persons who are conscious and capable of suffering, but on the supposition that they are such persons as have been condemned to a punishment which is not to cease so long as they are sensitive to it.
And this is the idea on the basis of which the word náir is mythologically applied to the damned and tortured beings in the lower world.
If we now take into account that our ancestors believed in a second death, in a slaying of souls in Hades, then we find that this same use of the word in question, which at first sight could not but seem strange, is a consistent development of the idea that those banished from Hel's realms of bliss die a second time, when they are transferred across the border to Nifelhel and the world of torture. When they are overtaken by this second death they are for the second time náir. And, as this occurs at the gates of Nifelhel, it was perfectly proper to call the gates nágrindr.
We may imagine that it is terror, despair, or rage which, at the sight of the Na-gates, severs the bond between the damned spirit and his Hades-body, and that the former is anxious to soar away from its terrible destination. But however this may be, the avenging powers have runes, which capture the fugitive, put chains on his Hades-body, and force him to feel with it. The Sun-song, a Christian song standing on the scarcely crossed border of heathendom, speaks of damned ones whose breasts were risted (carved) with bloody runes, and Havamál of runes which restore consciousness to náir. Such runes are known by Odin. If he sees in a tree a gallows-nár (virgil-nár), then he can rist runes so that the body comes down to him and talks with him (see No. 70).
Ef ec se a tre uppi
vafa virgilná,
sva ec rist
oc i runom fác,
at sa gengr gumi
oc mælir vith mic (Havamál, 157).