Talk:Hel (mythological being)

message: I know that she was actually known as "Hel" to the Norsemen and not "Hela", but given the prominence of "Hela" in modern sources ranging from Marvel Comics to the John Charles Dollman painting actually used as an illustration on this page something needs to be said about that form of the name somewhere on this page. --Khajidha (talk) 17:10, 20 September 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: It would be Hella if anything. Hela is a mispelling and no one even in the Marvel universe pronounce it any other way than Hella. Though the closest you could get to that name academically is the Helja, but Hel is just more universally used.Carewolf (talk) 20:38, 3 April 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hela 

message: I must express my surprise about the confusion about Hel not being categrorized or named a Goddess. This seem to be because she was not a part of the group asynja (modern Swedish spelling). It does seem a little odd. The asynja was simply the name of the goddesses belonging to the group of deities living in Asgard. Not all gods or goddesses lived in Asgard, but that does not mean that they where not gods or goddesses.  To designate her as 'not a goddess' because she did not belong to the goddesses living in Asgard, and thus not having the title of asynja, is essentially the same thing as not categorizing Hades as a god because he did not reside in Olympus: true enough, Hades is not categorized as one of the Olympians for that reason, but that does not mean that he is not a god, not does anyone say he is not.  Now, Hel is categorized as a "being", which is a little odd, as there is no true difference between being a "supernatural being" and being a goddess in this case, and she function as a goddess in all issues - beside for the fact, it seems, that she her place of residence disqualify her as such.  All this seem to me to be a uneccessary semantic confusion, perhaps originally founded on a misunderstanding during translation, that a goddess need to live in Asgard and have the title asynja to be counted as a goddess.  This is comparable to the Greek mythology, where many gods does not live in Olympus - or many other mythologies, for example, the goddess Ereshkigal, who like Hel are the queen of the underworld and the goddess of the death and have the same functions as Hel.  This is uneccessary and creates unhelpful consequences for the readers and users of Wikipedia.  To remove the categories "death goddesses" and so forth is not helpful to the reader, because she was a death goddess and functioned as such, and should be categorized with other "beings" with the same function rather than to be exclused because of a semantic designation. Indeed, Ereshkigal ias also a "supernatural being" - well, that is what a goddess is. --92.35.227.48 (talk) 15:56, 20 April 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: We don't make any assumptions on Wikipedia, we stick to what scholarship says. The question of whether or not Hel was considered to be some kind of goddess or a jötunn remains entirely open-ended in the source material, which scholarship on the matter reflects. :bloodofox: (talk) 00:00, 21 April 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Goddess Hel - the problem of semantics 

message: Why is Hel referred to as a "being" in English language Wikipedia? Is this an issue of English language scholarship? She is referred to as a goddess in Swedish scholarship. Would the term goddess be accepted about her if a reference is added describing this in Swedish language sholarship, or is she referred to as a being her simply because this is the preferred term about her in English language books? It seems an odd thing to sort her as a being, if this is only about the term ascribed for her in the English language. Would it not be more correct to follow the term described for her in the culture she originated? --Aciram (talk) 01:10, 17 January 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: We'e discussed scholastic reception of Hel above quite a lot (see above). The issue is that the corpus does not designate her as a goddess (ásynja), a jötunn, or anything else, which is unusual. Some scholars have even argued that she was essentially a late personification, and was not considered a goddess at all. We have significant discussion from scholars in the article on this, and we're not here to take a stance on the matter one way or another. :bloodofox: (talk) 07:35, 17 January 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Goddess in the Norse culture, "being" in the English language?