394
THE SAXONS IN ENGLAND.
[book I.
Hel with Nastrond to complete a hideous prison
for the guilty : the prevailing idea in the infernal
regions of the Teuton is cold and gloom1 ; the poi-
sonous snakes, which waking or sleeping seem ever
to have haunted the Anglosaxon, formed a conve-
nient point of junction between his own traditional
hell and that which he heard of from the pulpit,
in quotations from the works of the Fathers ; and
to these and their influence alone can it be attri-
buted when we find flames and sulphur, and all the
hideous apparatus of Judaic tradition, adopted by
him. In this fact seems to me to lie a very import-
ant mark of ancient heathendom, and one which the
clergy themselves admitted, a belief in which they
shared, and which they did not scruple, to impress
upon their flocks, even in spite of the contrary ten-
dency of their authorities : it will be sufficient to
refer to the description given of hell in the poetic
Salomon and Saturn, a composition redolent of
heathendom : on the defeat of the rebel angels, it
is said, God
him helle gescop,
wæleealde wɪe,
wintre beðeahte :
wæter insende
and Wyrmgeardas,
atol deor monig
irenum hoτnum ;
blodige earnas
and blé ce nædran ;
for them he made hell,
a dwelling deadly cold,
■with winter covered :
water he sent in
and snake-dwellings,
many a foul beast
with horns of iron ;
bloody eagles
and pale adders ;
1 Fire was too cheerful in the Noith to be sufficiently an object of
terror : it appeared otherwise in the East, where coolness is the greatest
of luxuries.
сн. ɪɪɪ.]
HEATHENDOM. HEL.
395
pirst and hunger
and J>earle gewin,
eacne egesan,
unrotnisse.
thirst and hunger
and fierce conflict,
mighty terror,
j Oylessness ɪ.
Even in their more orthodox descriptions, eccle-
siastical poets, though naturally adopting the Ju-
daic notions, cannot always shake off the old, ha-
bitual tradition of their forefathers,' but recur to
the frost, gloom and serpents of Nastrond, and the
realm of Hel ; of which a passage already quoted
from Beda is ample evidence.
As far as we can judge from the descriptions
which survive, the Anglosaxons represented Hell to
themselves as a close and covered dwelling, a prison
duly secured as earthly prisons are by locks, bolts
and bars2. But the popular fancy had probably
even then adopted the notion of a monstrous beast
whose mouth was the entrance to the place of tor-
ment : this appears not only from the illustrations
to Cædmon3, but from the common expression, so
long current, of Hell-mouth. From this peculiar
feature however we may believe that a remembrance
still lurked among our forefathers of the gigantic
or Titanic character of the ancient goddess, who, in
Norse mythology, was Loki’s daughter. In nearly
every case, the word Hel in Anglosaxon, and espe-
cially Anglosaxon prose, has merely the abstract
sense we now give it ; but here and there a passage
l Sal Sat. p. 173.
2 Beda h mself speaks of ', inform claustra ” (H. E. v. 13), and for
this there was supposed to be sufficient authority in the figurative ex-
pression, Matt. xvi. 18.
3 Published by the Society of Antiquaries.