In January 2017 Iceland’s naming committee blocked a couple from naming their daughter Hel, judging the name too heavy a burden for a child. This episode asks why a figure from centuries-old Norse folklore still carries that much weight. Drawing on the 13th-century Prose Edda, ninth-century skaldic poetry, linguistic research and migration-era gold bracteates, it follows Hel from her secret childhood in Jotunheim as the daughter of Loki and the giantess Angrboda, alongside the wolf Fenrir and the serpent Jormungandr, to Odin’s decision to hurl her into the mist of Niflheim.

The discussion covers her half-flesh, half-corpse appearance, her hall with its dish named Hunger, knife named Famine and bed named Sickbed, and the ransom of Baldr, where her demand that everything in the universe weep is read as a sovereign asserting jurisdiction rather than petty cruelty. It then turns to the etymological argument from Rudolf Simek and John Lindow that Hel began as a word for the grave itself, Jacob Grimm’s counter-claim that she was an ancient goddess comparable to Kali, and her later lives as a demon queen fighting Satan, a video-game character, and Marvel’s Hela in Thor: Ragnarok.

• The bound-monster motif: how Odin’s containment of Loki’s children helps bring about Ragnarok
• Why Hel receives those who die of sickness and old age while warriors go to Valhalla
• The Ynglingatal’s dignified image of kings called into Hel’s embrace
• How Snorri Sturluson may have dressed a neutral concept of the grave in Christian imagery
• Bracteates showing a rider greeted by a scepter-bearing woman as possible early evidence of worship