Hel's most important moment in the mythology is her refusal in the tale of Baldr. When the beloved god is killed and Hermod rides down to her hall to plead for his release, Hel does not simply refuse; she sets a condition that seems generous but proves impossible, she will let Baldr go if every single thing in the world, living and dead, weeps for him. When one giantess (widely taken to be Loki in disguise) declines to weep, Baldr must stay, and Hel keeps him until the renewal of the world after Ragnarok. Her hall, with its grim furnishings, and its very name became, through the conversion, one root of the English word and idea of hell, though the Norse Hel was originally less a place of punishment than simply the abode of the ordinary dead, presided over by a goddess who kept firmly what was given into her charge.
Snorri's Prose Edda gives Hel's hall, called Eljudnir, a set of grimly named furnishings that read almost as dark wordplay: her dish is called Hunger, her knife Famine, her bed Sick-bed and its curtains Gleaming Bale, and her threshold Stumbling-block, a household inventory of deprivation and misfortune that turns the ordinary vocabulary of a Norse home into an image of death's bare, comfortless keeping. The description is often read less as a picture of active torment than as an image of the dead stripped of all the warmth, plenty and hospitality that defined a proper Norse household in life.