Origins and development
Jacob Grimm described Hel as an example of a "half-goddess": "one who cannot be shown to be either wife or daughter of a god, and who stands in a dependent relation to higher divinities", and argued that "half-goddesses" stand higher than "half-gods" in Germanic mythology. Grimm regarded Hel (whom he refers to here as Halja, the theorized Proto-Germanic form of the term) as essentially an "image of a greedy, unrestoring, female deity" and theorized that "the higher we are allowed to penetrate into our antiquities, the less hellish and more godlike may Halja appear". He compared her role, her black color, and her name to "the Indian Bhavani, who travels about and bathes like Nerthus and Holda, but is likewise called Kali or Mahakali, the great black goddess" and concluded that "Halja is one of the oldest and commonest conceptions of our heathenism". He theorized that the Helhest, a three-legged horse that in Danish folklore roams the countryside "as a harbinger of plague and pestilence", was originally the steed of the goddess Hel, and that on this steed Hel roamed the land "picking up the dead that were her due". He also says that a wagon was once ascribed to Hel.
In her 1948 work on death in Norse mythology and religion, The Road to Hel, Hilda Ellis Davidson argued that the description of Hel as a goddess in surviving sources appeared to be literary personification, the word hel generally being "used simply to signify death or the grave", which she states "naturally lends itself to personification by poets". While noting that "whether this personification has originally been based on a belief in a goddess of death called Hel [was] another question", she stated that she did not believe the surviving sources gave any reason to believe so, while they included various other examples of "supernatural women" who "seem to have been closely connected with the world of death, and were pictured as welcoming dead warriors". She suggested that the depiction of Hel "as a goddess" in Gylfaginning "might well owe something to these".
In a later work (1998), Davidson wrote that the description of Hel found in chapter 33 of Gylfaginning "hardly suggests a goddess", but that "in the account of Hermod's ride to Hel later in Gylfaginning (49)", Hel "[speaks] with authority as ruler of the underworld" and that from her realm "gifts are sent back to Frigg and Fulla by Balder's wife Nanna as from a friendly kingdom". She posited that Snorri may have "earlier turned the goddess of death into an allegorical figure, just as he made Hel, the underworld of shades, a place 'where wicked men go,' like the Christian Hell (Gylfaginning 3)". She then, like Grimm, compared Hel to Kali:
On the other hand, a goddess of death who represents the horrors of slaughter and decay is something well known elsewhere; the figure of Kali in India is an outstanding example. Like Snorri's Hel, she is terrifying to in appearance, black or dark in colour, usually naked, adorned with severed heads or arms or the corpses of children, her lips smeared with blood. She haunts the battlefield or cremation ground and squats on corpses. Yet for all this she is "the recipient of ardent devotion from countless devotees who approach her as their mother" [...].
Davidson further compared Hel to early attestations of the Irish goddesses Badb (described in The Destruction of Da Choca's Hostel as dark in color, with a large mouth, wearing a dusky mantle, and with gray hair falling over her shoulders, or, alternatively, "as a red figure on the edge of the ford, washing the chariot of a king doomed to die") and the Morrígan. She concluded that, in these examples, "here we have the fierce destructive side of death, with a strong emphasis on its physical horrors, so perhaps we should not assume that the gruesome figure of Hel is wholly Snorri's literary invention".
John Lindow stated that most details about Hel, as a figure, are not found outside of Snorri's writing in Gylfaginning, and that when older skaldic poetry "says that people are 'in' rather than 'with' Hel, we are clearly dealing with a place rather than a person, and this is assumed to be the older conception". He theorizes that the noun and place Hel likely originally simply meant "grave", and that "the personification came later". Lindow also drew a parallel between the personified Hel's banishment to the underworld and the binding of Fenrir as part of a recurring theme of the bound monster, where an enemy of the gods is bound but destined to break free at Ragnarok. Rudolf Simek similarly stated that the figure of Hel is "probably a very late personification of the underworld Hel", that "on the whole nothing speaks in favour of there being a belief in Hel in pre-Christian times", and noted that "the first scriptures using the goddess Hel are found at the end of the 10th and in the 11th centuries". He characterized the allegorical description of Hel's house in Gylfaginning as "clearly ... in the Christian tradition". However, elsewhere in the same work, Simek cites an argument made by Karl Hauck that one of three figures appearing together on Migration Period B-bracteates is to be interpreted as Hel.
