Chapters 44-95 - Germanic Mythology

Tamsvendi eg þig drep,
en eg þig temja mun,
mær, að mínum munum;
þar skaltu ganga,
er þig gumna synir
síðan æva sjá.
With the taming wand will I
strike (slay) you
and I will tame you
maid, to my wishes;
There you shall go
To where the sons of men
Shall never see you again.
This is the former threat of death repeated in another form. The former did not
frighten her. But that which now overwhelms her with dismay is the description Skirnir
gives her of the lot that awaits her in the realm of death, to where she is destined - she,
the giant maid, if she dies by the avenging wrath of the gods (gambanreiði). She shall
then come to that region which is situated below the Na-gates (fyr nágrindur neðan - 35),
and which is inhabited by frost-giants who, as we shall find, do not deserve the name
mannasynir, even though the word menn be taken in its most common sense, and made to
embrace giants of the masculine kind.
This phrase fyr nágrindur neðan must have been a stereotyped eschatological
term applied to a particular division, a particular realm in the lower world. In Lokasenna
63, Thor says to Loki, after the latter has emptied his vials of rash insults upon the gods,
that if he does not hold his tongue the hammer Mjolnir shall send him to Hel fyr
nágrindur neðan. Hel is used here in its widest sense, and this is limited by the addition
of the words "below the Na-gates," so as to refer to a particular division of the lower
world. As we find by the application of the phrase to Loki, this division is of such a
character that it is intended to receive the foes of the Aesir and the insulters of the gods.
The word Nágrind, which is always used in the plural, and accordingly refers to
more than one gate of the kind, has as its first part nár (pl. náir), which means corpse,
dead body. Thus Na-gates means Corpse-gates. 1
The name must seem strange, for it is not dead bodies, but souls, released from
their bodies left on earth, which descend to the kingdom of death and get their various
abodes there. How far our heathen ancestors had a more or less material conception of the
soul is a question which it is not necessary to discuss here (on this point, see No. 95).
Howsoever they may have regarded it, the very existence of a Hades in their mythology
demonstrates that they believed that a conscious and sentient element in man was
separated in death from the body with which it had been united in life, and went down to
the lower world. That the body from which this conscious, sentient element fled was not
removed to Hades, but disintergated in this upper earth, whether it was burnt or buried in
a mound or sunk to the bottom of the sea, this our heathen ancestors knew just as well as
we know it. The people of the stone-age already knew this.
The phrase Na-gates does not stand alone in our mythological eschatology. One
of the abodes of torture lying within the Na-gates is called Nastrond (Náströnd), and is
described in Völuspá as filled with terrors. And the victims, which Nidhogg, the winged
1 This phrase is commonly taken to mean "beneath the gate of the dead," and thus "in Hel." Dronke takes
this a step further and interprets nágrindr to mean "a fenced graveyard" and renders the phrase as "below
the corpse pens," implying "deep within the earth, (i.e. 'lower than the buried dead')… an ugly threat in
itself." PE II, pg 412. This said, the concrete threat, becomes only a figurative one, and thereby the impact
is lessened.