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MC: I'm not sure I go along with that interpretation. I don't really see Frigga, from my limited interactions with Her, as the kind of being who'd consciously tear off on a wild goose-chase of such epic proportions just to cover up Her husband's conspiracy.
Oh, no, I don't mean Odin's Conspiracy. I don't think Odin planned it at all. I mean Frigga saw and knew of Her own accord (It is said that She knows all, but never speaks of it) and as such had to do the extremely difficult thing of going through it all, deliberately leaving out the Mistletoe, and then confessing to somebody else (an extremely out-of-character thing to do, which is a lot of where I get this interpretation) that Mistletoe had been left out.
What I get from the story is a lesson: that even if you have access to unparalleled knowledge of the future, you can still be blinded to it by your own emotions. But that's just my take on things.
*nod* Yeah, and I don't think yours is less right than mine. Heck, they may not be mutually exclusive. I highly suspect that this, as with the interpretation of who Od was, why He left, where He went, etc. etc. is a Mystery: Our interpretation tells us more about ourselves, and what we need to understand from the world.
Ultimately, if you ask me, even if they contradict, it is the nature of the Mystery that they are ALL true in their own right. It's not Historical Facts we're talking about here, it's Mythic Patterns. The answer is whatever it needs to be.
But this is, I think, worth it's own thread if we're going to keep digging at it.
Why do you think that Hel (or Frigga) is like a hollywood starlet or a poker player, and we should take your word for it?
Well, I can't truely speak for Vadrice, but I think I understand the paralell being made here, so let me give it a try.
Hela, having been scrutinized by the Christians, and shoved into a box called "Evil", because there wasn't a more appropriate place for Her in the Christian mythos, is like a Silver Screen Starlet in that A) She was once regarded in Her own right "back in the day", B) She spent an interim time when the social climate shifted, only coming up as a vilified narrow stereotype in the moral equivalent of Tabloids designed for sensational response and simplistic worldview, rather than anything to do with Her at all, personally and thus C) She is likely to have developed a Flak Shield.
Because of this potential Flak Shield, one may not presume, even from having met Her in person, that they actually know what She thinks of them, or how She feels. It does not profit Her to show it, and only opens Her up to further vilification.
On the one hand, I think this paralell of human behavior is potentially useful. A lot of what the myths teach us is indeed about the patterns of human nature.
On the other hand, I haven't seen much of anything out of Hela that indicates that it's true.
Rather, I see that She is very calm, but my impression isn't of a poker face or flak shield, but of one who is rarely all that terribly disturbed by extrems of emotion in the first place. The calm I percieve is one of deep understanding of necessity, and the inevitable nature of death, and other such things. Maybe I'm wrong about the calm, or the reasons for it. She's never specifically told me. That's just my impression from interacting with Her.
The fact that I have seen Her (via mediums, or in journey) take Her emotional energy level up a notch or two when it was useful to get Her point across makes me believe the calm I percieve at other times is real.
Vadrice: basicly i'm trying to explain my impression of a subject, to be agreed with or not, but instead of hearing "hey you, you're off your rocker" i'm hearing "what are your references?"
i assure you, i'm not plagerizing!
*blinks* The model for this discussion is more scientific or rhetoric than it is artistic. We're not critiquing your creative writing as being too derivative. Perhaps you could say we're confused because your writing style is inappropriate to the genre you've jumped into. We're asking for research data, and so yes, the source of information matters. It's okay to say "Oh, the source is just that it popped into my head", but we want to know that because it tells us how to weigh the information relative to other sources and information that may contradict.
Lolo: According to ancient Greek mythology, living souls (with the exception of a couple of special instances) cannot visit the underworld. Does the Goddess Hel have similar biases?
In my experience, not quite. There are areas of Helheim where you mustn't go. There are areas where you must only go with good reason. But I haven't yet experienced or heard tell of, or witnessed a time when, despite our usual good reason (Oracular Seidh), the Seidh worker could not enter Helheim.
However, I have experienced that Helheim is not a good place for random people, or even any given Seidh worker to go. I have, personally, gotten quite sick from it, and there seems to be tremendous dissagreement within the community (at least locally) as to whether Oracular Seidh should even have Helheim as a frequent destination for the Seer/ess. It should be noted that we very specifically do NOT bring the entire audience with us into Helheim proper. The guided journey takes the whole group to the land outside the gates, and only the Seer/ess enters.
Quantum @ you Norse types, am I right in thinking Siegfried went to Hel? How does that work, I would have thought he'd end up fighting and drinking in Valhalla.
Or doing whatever-it-is-they-do in Folkvangr, for that matter.
Knudbrox I don't recall the circumstances of Sigurd's death
Mrf, I don't remember either. Lemme look that up... Okay. Sigurd is killed by a wound recieved why he lay sleeping. He got up immediately and killed his attacker. He had a bit of a chat with Gudrun about what he had and hadn't done to earn it, and then died. When they put him on the pyre, Brynhild is opts to burn with him. Then there's the Hel-Ride of Brynhild as a sort of appendix to this translation, at the end of which, she says "we twain together shall wear through the ages, Sigurd and I." which implies Sigurd is indeed on the Hel-bound chariot with her, doesn't it?
So my guess would be either Sigurd's murder and immediate retaliation doesn't qualify as Battle, and thus cannot qualify as Battle Chosen, or else, if Brynhild was indeed a Valkyrie, it may be that she chose to keep Sigurd with her, instead of taking him to Valhala or Folkvangr.
A third alternative comes to mind off the top of my head: The gold that Sigurd won by slaying Fafnir was cursed gold: "thou shalt find gold enow to suffice thee for all thy life-days; yet shall that gold be thy bane, and the bane of every one soever who owns it". That gold, and the ring made of it that Sigurd gave to Brynhild, are ostensibly what created their dooms. Perhaps it is part of the nature of the doom that they don't get the happy-endings of afterlife in Asgard?
Haloquin one theory has it that the Harlequin was originally a leader/participant of the French/German wild hunts. But I'm not sure how true that is.
That's pretty interesting, and makes me wonder how it correlates to things like Tam Lin, and the tithe to Faerie, etc.
Sekhmet I associate Her with the Perthro rune...
Well, I think the most common association is with Hagal, which I've also heard used as a kenning for Hela. That is the Younger Futhark Hagalaz, and shaped more like a snowflake than the letter H, and my understanding is that it has a somewhat gentler interpretation than Hagalaz, which is also associated with Hela. Personally, given how I interact with Her, I associate Her with Nauthiz - the intense NEED that drives the will.
Another thing that came up out of the writing piece is that Hela might have actually been in love with Baldr, which adds a weird, tragico-romantic dimension to that whole tale that I'm not entirely comfortable with... and I'm not sure whether to think of it as UPG or pure invention.
Well, given that it's said that Baldr's wife Nana threw Herself upon His pyre and thus went to Helheim with Him, I'm not sure how much it helps Hela to have Baldr AND Nana there.
MC: And anyhow the whole thing is less clear-cut than some people make out.
There is an explanation that the Scandinavian concept of soul isn't a single thing, but that we have several pieces, and they each go to different places when we die. The part that stays in the grave mound isn't the same part that stays with the family isn't the part that dies with the body isn't the part that goes to either Helheim, Valhalla, Folkvangr, or the hall of their patron deity. Etc. etc.
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