Hel is the Norse goddess who rules the realm of the dead that bears her name, Helheim, the cold place below the world to which go those who die of sickness and old age rather than in battle, for the slain in war are claimed instead by Odin and Freyja. She is a daughter of the trickster Loki and the giantess Angrboda, and sister of the great wolf Fenrir and the world-serpent Jormungandr. Snorri describes her as half one colour and half another, one side the hue of living flesh, the other the blue-black of a corpse, a body that shows her nature as the boundary between life and death. Odin, the story goes, cast her down into the mist-world and gave her authority over the nine realms of the dead, to apportion lodging to all who came to her.
Unlike major cult-gods such as Thor or Freyr, Hel has left no trace of shrine, offering or place-name confidently tied to active worship; she appears to have functioned for the Norse almost entirely as a mythological and literary figure describing where the ordinary dead went, rather than as a deity anyone prayed to or sacrificed for favour, a pattern comparative religion scholars have noted resembles the Greek Hades, another ruler of the dead who commanded remarkably little independent cult despite his central place in myth. In both traditions the power that presides over ordinary death seems to have mattered more as an explanatory figure than as an object of active devotion.