Yggdrasil · Cold and the Dead

Niflhel

A region of the dead below Hel, named in Vafþrúðnismál, Baldrs draumar and Gylfaginning.

Myth and literature · Quotation

In Thorpe’s translation

43. … for I have over each world travelled; to nine worlds I came, to Niflhel beneath: here die men from Hel.

6. Uprose Odin lord of men and on Sleipnir he the saddle laid; rode thence down to Niflhel. A dog he met, from Hel coming.

  • Benjamin Thorpe (translator), The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson (the Poetic Edda) (opens in a new tab) (19th c.; Norroena ed. 1906), Vafþrúðnismál, stanza 43; Baldrs draumar, stanza 6 (Thorpe’s numbering; other editions differ) Rights: Public domain. Nineteenth-century translation, in the public domain. Text as published online by Project Gutenberg (ebook #14726).
Myth and literature · Quotation

In Blackwell’s translation

“… but the wicked shall go to Hel, and thence to Niflhel, which is below, in the ninth world.”

Myth and literature

What the sources say

Vafþrúðnismál has the giant Vafþrúðnir say that he travelled over each world and came to nine worlds, to “Niflhel beneath”, where men die “from Hel”. In Baldrs draumar, Odin rides down to Niflhel on Sleipnir and meets a dog coming from Hel, on his way to seek news of Baldr’s dream.

In Gylfaginning Snorri gives the place a moral shape: the righteous live with the All-father in Gimlé, while the wicked go to Hel and then on to Niflhel, “which is below, in the ninth world”. Elsewhere in Gylfaginning, Hel is cast into Niflheim and given power over nine worlds. None of these passages draws a map that fits the others, and the poems do not say how Niflhel stands to Hel.

Myth and literature · Context

Names and background

The name is built from nifl and hel, and this edition’s glossary explains it that way without saying more. It names a place of the dead tied to Hel, which is also the name of the ruler and of her realm.

Readers disagree about whether Niflhel is the same as Hel, a part of it, a deeper place under it, or the same as Niflheim. The texts do not settle the matter, and Snorri’s scheme, in which Niflhel is the last stop for the wicked, is not repeated in the poems. Niflheim, Hel and Niflhel are best kept as three names that overlap, not as boxes set inside one another.

Historical evidence

Where the sources attest it

Niflhel is named in Vafþrúðnismál (stanza 43 in Thorpe’s numbering) and in Baldrs draumar (stanza 6), two poems of the Poetic Edda, and in Snorri’s Gylfaginning, which adds the idea that the wicked pass on to it from Hel. The name is used for the dead in all three, and in none of them is it described as a landscape. There is no archaeological or pictorial evidence for the place.