Chapters 44-95 - Germanic Mythology

He who has observed these virtues may, as the old skald sings of himself, "glad, with
good will and without dejection, await Hel" (Sonatorrek 25):
Skal eg þó glaður
með góðan vilja
og óhryggur
Heljar bíða.
If the judgment on the dead is lenient in these respects, it is inexorably severe in
other matters. Lies uttered to injure others, perjury, murder (secret murder, assassination,
not justified as blood-revenge), adultery, the profaning of temples, the opening of gravemounds,
treason, cannot escape their awful punishment. Ineffable terrors await those who
are guilty of these sins. Those psychopomps that belong to Niflhel await the adjournment
of the Thing in order to take them to the world of torture, and Urd has bonds (Heljar reip
- Sólarljóð 37; Des Todes Seil - J. Grimm, Deutsche Mythology, ch. 27), which make
every escape impossible.
72.
THE HADES-DRINK.
Before the dead leave the thingstead near Urd's fountain, something which
obliterated the marks of earthly death has happened to those who are judged happy. Pale,
cold, mute, and with the marks of the spirits of disease, they left Midgard and started on
the Hel-way. They leave the death-Thing full of the warmth of life, with health, with
speech, and more robust than they were on earth. The shades have become corporal.
When those slain by the sword ride over Gjöll to Urd's fountain, scarcely a sound is heard
under the hoofs of their horses; when they ride away from the fountain over Bifröst, the
bridge resounds under the trampling horses. The sagas of the Middle Ages have
preserved, but at the same time demonized, the memory of how Hel's inhabitants were
endowed with more than human strength (Grettis Saga, ch. 35, and several other
passages).
The life of bliss presupposes health, but also forgetfulness of the earthly sorrows
and cares. The heroic poems and the sagas of the Middle Ages have known that there was
a Hades-potion which brings freedom from sorrow and care, without obliterating dear
memories or making one forget that which can be remembered without longing or
anxiety. In the mythology this drink was, as shall be shown, one that simultaneously
produces vitality and the forgetfulness of sorrows.
In Saxo, and in the heroic poems of the Elder Edda which belong to the Gjukung
group of songs, there reappear many mythical details, though they are sometimes taken
out of their true connection and put in a light which does not originally belong to them.
Among the mythical reminiscences is the Hades-potion.
In his account of King Gorm's and Thorkil's journey to the lower world, Saxo (see
No. 46) makes Thorkil warn his travelling companions from tasting the drinks offered
them by the prince of the lower world, for the reason that they produce forgetfulness, and