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litafficionado:

“If you give children a vocabulary that’s large enough and complex enough to express their emotions and their ideas, you give them access to complex feelings and emotions in themselves. So that if you talk to a teenager and all they can say about how they feel is BAD, and they haven’t got, you know, a larger vocabulary for lonely, abused, insecure, frightened…I mean there’s this huge panoply which…I remember when my daughter was just telling me that she just felt bad, I bought her a thesaurus. I said, “Look up, is it sort of over lonely, or is it insecure…and look up under lonely, you’ll find two hundred words for lonely. Which one?” But what that does is that it makes you feel that there’s this huge complexity of emotions and there are words for all of them. If you want children to feel less frustrated and less disenfranchised and less unable to even feel comfortable with their own emotions, you’ll have to give them a vocabulary that’s as complicated as their inner lives. And one of the things we see in children is this incredibly reduced capacity for reporting their inner lives to the exterior world. One of the things is just teaching them poems, just teaching them to memorize poems in school, they don’t have to interpret them, if they just internalize the language of the poem, the complexity of the emotion in the poems…”
–Jorie Graham, in a conversation

What is Hel (the place) like? Who goes to Hel? Is it something to be feared?

answersfromvanaheim:

trollkunnigr:

theasatrucommunity:

Hel is the realm that most people will see after they perish. Those who do not go to Odin’s or Freyja’s hall after dying in battle will find themselves in Hel. Unlike the Christian adaptation of the underworld, Hel [for the most part] is not a place of punishment and should not be feared. In literature, the realm has been defined to be in eternal Autumn, and the spirits continue their life’s work just as if they were still alive in Midgard. There have been other parts of Hel described to exist to punish law and oath breakers, but for the most part, Hel is a rather pleasant place.

This! Hel (or more accurately Helheim)  is not to be confused with the Christian Hell. 

It is literally just a place that spirits go who were not chosen for Valhalla. The only ones chosen for Valhalla are the absolute best fighters and warriors because Odin wants them to help fight for him at Ragnarok. 

Families and friends are reunited, there are fires, and it is considered to be a place of rest and fellowship. Do not think of this as a negative place. 

Likewise, Hel (or Hela) does not represent the Devil. She is a kind Goddess who is gentle with Spirits and helps the Bereaved family grieve and heal. 

I would also like to note that there are more possible afterlife destinations than Hel, Valhalla, or Folkvangr.

  • You could stay around your grave, giving advice to your descendants. (This is really popular in certain Heathen circles.)
  • You could chill with your ancestors in a mountain.
  • You could go live with Ran in her hall (she takes drowning victims).
  • You could reincarnate (some say you only reincarnate through the family line).

And since the soul (for lack of a better term) is split into multiple parts, it’s possible that different bits go to different places. IIRC I think the fylgja could be inherited.

None of these afterlives are better or worse than others, they’re just different.

This explains it better than I could.