Helle

This enigmatic power rules the underworld, and the land of the dead. It is widely circulated in some circles that she might be the same entity as Holda, though this is quite wrong, and is not supported either mythologically or etymologically.

She appears as a powerful woman, half dead and monstrous, half living and beautiful, showing us a duplicity which often echoes our perceptions of death itself. She rules the Halls of the underworld, which wait to recieve the vast majority of heathen dead. Though Norse sources refer to Helle as the horrifying daughter of Loki, god of mischief, the Anglo-Saxons and Continental Saxons appeared to view her quite differently. There is little evidence that she had an actual cult in ancient times, and it is probably safest to say that common perceptions of her prior to the coming of Christianity would have been ambivalent at best, though her realm is thought to be pleasant enough in some areas, depending on how the souls who arrive there are adjudged.