With a Jotun woman, Angerbode, or Messenger of Evil, Loki begets three fell children. The first is Fenris, a savage wolf, so large that nothing but space can hold him. The second is Jormungandur, who, with his tail in his mouth, fills the circuit of the ocean. He is described by Sir Walter Scott as
"That great sea snake, tremendous curl'd, Whose monstrous circle girds the world."
The third is Hela, the grim goddess of death, whose ferocious aspect is half of a pale blue and half of a ghastly white, and whose empire, stretching below the earth through Niflheim, is full of freezing vapors and discomfortable sights. Her residence is the spacious under world; her court yard, faintness; her threshold, precipice; her door, abyss; her hall, pain; her table, hunger; her knife, starvation; her man servant, delay; her handmaid, slowness; her bed, sickness; her pillow, anguish; and her canopy, curse. Still lower than her house is an abode yet more fearful and loathsome. In Nastrond, or strand of corpses, stands a hall, the conception of which is prodigiously awful and enormously disgusting. It is plaited of serpents' backs, wattled together like wicker work, whose heads turn inwards, vomiting poison. In the lake of venom thus deposited within these immense wriggling walls of snakes the worst of the damned wade and swim.
High up in the sky is Odin's hall, the magnificent Valhalla, or temple of the slain. The columns supporting its ceiling are spears. It is roofed with shields, and the ornaments on its benches are coats of mail. The Valkyrs are Odin's battle maids, choosers of heroes for his banquet rooms. With helmets on their heads, in bloody harness, mounted on shadowy steeds, surrounded by meteoric lightnings, and wielding flaming swords, they hover over the conflict and point the way to Valhalla to the warriors who fall. The valiant souls thus received to Odin's presence are called Einheriar, or the elect. The Valkyrs, as white clad virgins with flowing ringlets, wait on them in the capacity of cup bearers. Each morning, at the crowing
3 Oehlenschlager, Gods of the North. This celebrated and brilliant poem, with the copious notes in Frye's translation, affords the English reader a full conception of the Norse pantheon and its salient adventures.
of a huge gold combed cock, the well armed Einheriar rush through Valhalla's five hundred and forty doors into a great court yard, and pass the day in merciless fighting. However pierced and hewn in pieces in these fearful encounters, at evening every wound is healed, and they return into the hall whole, and are seated, according to their exploits, at a luxurious feast. The perennial boar Sehrimnir, deliciously cooked by Andrimnir, though devoured every night, is whole again every morning and ready to be served anew. The two highest joys these terrible berserkers and vikings knew on earth composed their experience in heaven: namely, a battle by day and a feast by night. It is a vulgar error, long prevalent, that the Valhalla heroes drink out of the skulls of their enemies. This notion, though often refuted, still lingers in the popular mind. It arose from the false translation of a phrase in the death song of Ragnar Lodbrok, the famous sea king, "Soon shall we drink from the curved trees of the head," which, as a figure for the usual drinking horns, was erroneously rendered by Olaus Wormius, "Soon shall we drink from the hollow cups of skulls." It is not the heads of men, but the horns of beasts, from which the Einheriar quaff Heidrun's mead.4
No women being ever mentioned as gaining admission to Valhalla or joining in the joys of the Einheriar, some writers have affirmed that, according to the Scandinavian faith, women had no immortal souls, or, at all events, were excluded from heaven. The charge is as baseless in this instance as when brought against Mohammedanism. Valhalla was the exclusive abode of the most daring champions; but Valhalla was not the whole of heaven. Vingolf, the Hall of Friends, stood beside the Hall of the Slain, and was the assembling place of the goddesses.5 There, in the palace of Freya, the souls of noble women were received after death. The elder Edda says that Thor guided Roska, a swift footed peasant girl who had attended him as a servant on various excursions, to Freya's bower, where she was welcomed, and where she remained forever. The virgin goddess Gefjone, the Northern Diana, also had a residence in heaven, and all who died maidens repaired thither.6 The presence of virgin throngs with Gefjone, and the society of noble matrons in Vingolf, shed a tender gleam across the carnage and carousal of Valhalla. More is said of the latter the former is scarcely visible to us now because the only record we have of the Norse faith is that contained in the fragmentary strains of ferocious Skalds, who sang chiefly to warriors, and the staple matter of whose songs was feats of martial prowess or entertaining mythological stories. Furthermore, there is above the heaven of the Asir a yet higher heaven, the abode of the far removed and inscrutable being, the rarely named Omnipotent One, the true All Father, who is at last to come forth above the ruins of the universe to judge and sentence all creatures and to rebuild a better world. In this highest region towers the imperishable gold roofed hall, Gimle, brighter than the sun. There is no hint anywhere in the Skaldic strains that good women are repulsed from this dwelling.
According to the rude morality of the people and the time, the contrasted conditions of admission to the upper paradise or condemnation to the infernal realm were the admired
4 Pigott, Manual of Scandinavian Mythology, p. 65.
5 Keyser, Religion of the Northmen, trans. by Pennock, p. 149.