Something a little different but perhaps appropriate for the season, coming on the heels of Hallowe’en and at the beginning of November, known to Anglo-Saxons as Blotmonath or ‘the month of blood’ – a post about Hell! In religion and folklore, Hell is an afterlife location in which evil souls are subjected to punitive suffering, often torture as eternal punishment after death. The modern English word hell is derived from Old English hel, helle (first attested around 725 AD to refer to a nether world of the dead) reaching into the Anglo-Saxon pagan period. Hell appears in several mythologies and religions. It is commonly inhabited by demons and the souls of dead people. A fable about Hell which recurs in folklore across several cultures is the allegory of the long spoons. Hell is often depicted in art and literature, perhaps most famously in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Other religions, which do not conceive of the afterlife as a place of punishment or reward, merely describe an abode of the dead, the grave, a neutral place that is located under the surface of Earth (for example, see Kur, Hades, and Sheol). Such places are sometimes equated with the English word ‘hell’, though a more correct translation would be ‘underworld’ or ‘world of the dead’. From illustrations in The Far Side comics and TV’s South Park, to centuries-old works like Paradise Lost and Dante’s Inferno, humanity has always wanted answers about hell. Lots of people have theories, some based in fact and some based on fiction.
Top Posts & Pages
The Inn at the Edge of the World
Click image to read my short story 'The Inn at the Edge of the World' in Bardic Tales and Sage Advice, Vol. 8.
The Witch of Wicken Fen
Click image to read my short story 'The Witch of Wicken Fen' in Aphelion, the Webzine of sci-fi and fantasy.
Tolkien
-
After the King: Tolkien’s heirs
It is something of a relief, having looked last month at his critics, to turn this time to Tolkien’s many admirers. It would not be true to say that there was no such thing as epic fantasy before Tolkien: there was a tradition of English and Irish writers before him, such as E R Eddison and […]
-
Tolkien: The Monsters and the Critics
“This is not a work that many adults will read right through more than once.” With these words the anonymous reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement (25 November 1955) summed up his judgment of J R R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. It must have seemed a pretty safe prophecy at the time, for of […]
-
The Wolf in the Attic
1920s Oxford: home to C S Lewis, J R R Tolkien and, in Paul Kearney’s novel The Wolf in the Attic, Anna Francis, a young Greek girl looking to escape the grim reality of her new life. The night they cross paths, none suspect the fantastic world at work all around them. Anna lives in a […]
-
Of Wood Woses and Wild Men
In The Lord of the Rings a strange and primitive folk named the Woses came to aid the men of Gondor in breaking the siege of Minas Tirith. These wild woodland people lived in the ancient forest of Druadan, below the White Mountains. In form they were weather-worn, short-legged, thick-armed and stumpy-bodied and they knew wood-craft […]
-
Spawn of Ungoliant
Among the foulest beings that ever inhabited Middle Earth were the Great Spiders. They were dark and filled with envy, greed and the poison of malice. First of the beings that took spider form was Ungoliant, mother of the evil race that plagued the world thereafter, as well as a close ally of the first […]
Posts I Like
