Representations of the Pagan Afterlife in Medieval Scandinavian Literature

the river

The second landmark that Hermóðr meets on his way to Hel is the river Gjll. Once again, the only eddic poem to mention this feature is Grímnismál, which includes Gjll in a list of rivers which fall ‘down from here to Hel’ in stanza 28:

Vína heitir enn, nnor Vegsvinn,

þriðia Þióðnuma,

Nyt oc Nt, Nnn oc Hrnn,

Slíð oc Hríð, Sylgr oc Ylgr,

Víð oc Ván, Vnd oc Strnd,

Gioll oc Leiptr, þær falla gumnom nær,

enn falla til heliar heðan.²⁹
The idea that all of these rivers run down out of Miðgarðr, close to mankind, and into Hel is contradicted by Gylfaginning’s account of the creation of the world, in which the spring Hvergelmir, which lies in Niflheimr – already at the bottom of the ‘vertical axis’ and interchangeable with Hel³⁰ – is the source from which they flow, but Gjll is still particularly closely associated with the realm of the dead:
Þá mælir Jafnhár: ‘Fyrr var þat mrgum ldum en jrð var skpuð er Niflheimr var grr, ok í honum miðjum liggr bruðr sá er Hvergelmir heitir, ok þaðan af falla þær ár er svá heita: Svl, Gunnþrá, Fjrm, Fimbulþul, Slíðr ok Hríð, Sylgr ok Ylgr, Víð, Leiptr; Gjll er næst Helgrindum.³¹
In the narrative of Hermóðr’s ride to Hel, the river Gjll is the penultimate obstacle that the hero must negotiate, although Móðguðr's statement that the road to Hel is downwards and to the north suggests that he has some distance to travel, and that Gjll does not actually form the physical boundary of Hel’s domain. Because there is a bridge with an unthreatening guardian, Hermóðr has no trouble in crossing the river.

Beyond Grímnismál’s brief mention of Gjll running down into Hel along with many other watercourses, this river does not appear in poetic sources, and it is only in Gylfaginning that it forms part of Hel’s landscape. In Christian visionary literature, on the other hand, the river is one of the most widespread topographical features found in the underworld. Its wellspring is found in the Bible – Daniel’s vision of the Day of Judgment includes a river of fire flowing from the Ancient of Days and engulfing the wicked³² – and this stream commingled with the four rivers of hell found in the classical tradition to form a river, or rather a divergent set of motifs based on the idea of an infernal river, that remained an important part of the imagined landscape of hell throughout the Middle Ages and which found its way into Dante’s Inferno.³³ The conduit through which this river flowed was most probably the highly influential Visio Sancti Pauli, which in its various redactions disseminated the motif of the infernal rivers across Western Europe.³⁴ The Visio’s debt to classical ideas of hell is readily apparent. In its earliest versions, and in medieval redactions II and VIII, one of the three rivers is named as Oceanus, which derives originally from Homer, while redactions I, III and VII of the apocryphon seem more closely dependent on the Aeneid for their treatment of the infernal rivers, among much else.³⁵

The Visio Sancti Pauli was certainly known in medieval Scandinavia: an Old Norse translation of the apocryphon was undertaken, perhaps in the late twelfth century, although the only extant manuscript of the vernacular text, AM 624 4to, appears to be a product of fifteenth-century Iceland.³⁶ But there is nothing in Snorri’s account of the river Gjll to link it to the torrents of torments found in the Visio. In the mainstream variants of the motif, the river acquires painful or unpleasant features through which it contributes to the punishments of the souls in hell: the river is usually fiery, or contains pitch or sulphur, and the immersion of sinners in the boiling liquid is often described.³⁷ Later elaborations of the motif gave the river further torturous characteristics: the river which all souls must cross on their eternal journey in both versions of the twelfth-century Visio Godeschalci is filled with knives,³⁸ while the Purgatorium Patricii inverts the river’s traditional characteristics in order to plunge sinners into an icy deluge.³⁹ There is no indication that Gjll shares any of these qualities: indeed, Snorri does not describe the river that Baldr crosses at all.

If it forms the border to Hel’s domain, then Gjll might be said to belong to a Vergilian conception of the underworld, as it is in Aeneid VI that a river – the Phlegethon – is first said to encircle the walled city of Tartarus:

Respicit Aeneas subito et sub rupe sinistra

moenia lata uidet triplici circumdata muro,

quae rapidus flammis ambit torrentibus amnis,

Tartareus Phlegethon, torquetque sonantia saxa.⁴⁰

Gjll, of course, is not fiery, and Aeneas’s path to the city of the damned takes him to the left, rather than to the north. The name Phlegethon (or Pyriphlegthon in Hellenistic sources: it appears first in book 10 of the Odyssey) derives from Greek Φλεγέθωυ – ‘blazing, burning’, emphasising its long-held fiery associations, whereas Gjll is related to the Old Norse verb gjalla – ‘to resound, make a loud noise’.⁴¹ It seems reasonable to assume that both river names reflect a characteristic feature of the watercourse they denote, but the significance of Gjll has never satisfactorily been explained. Perhaps the river itself is noisy, running in spate. Alternatively, it is possible that the noise is made by the clashing of solid objects in the waters, just like Vergil’s spinning boulders. There is no internal evidence to support the latter suggestion, but in Vluspá 36 we find a description of the river Slíðr – another of the rivers which Grímnismál has running down into the underworld – which flows with ‘swords and saxes’. The near-homophony of Vergil’s saxa and Vluspá’s sxom is, I presume, nothing more than a peculiar coincidence:⁴²

Vluspá 36

Á fellr austan um eitrdala,

sxom oc sverðom, Slíðr heitir sú.⁴³
A better model for a noisy river is found in Eilífr Goðrúnarson’s Þórsdrápa. In the mythical narrative of Þórr’s journey to Geirrøðargarðar as told by Eilífr,⁴⁴ an extremely perilous river is the main obstacle which the god must overcome in the first half of the poem: Þórr and Þjálfi spend stanzas 4-10 wading the turbid stream.⁴⁵ In stanza 6 the noise of the river is made extremely explicit:
Þar í mrk fyr –markar

málhvettan byr settu

(né hvélvlur Hallar)

háf- skotnaðra (sváfu)

knátti, hreggi hggvin,

hlymþél við ml glymja

en fellihryn fjalla

Feðju þaut með steðja.⁴⁶

As Davidson describes it, the river here is, amid a ‘bruising assault of noise’ a ‘chameleon-like torrent is one moment a clattering fish-trap, next a maelstrom with clanking stones, then a giant noise-file – hlymþel – hewed by the wind, and finally a hammering force clashing against an anvil’.⁴⁷ Clearly, if Snorri’s Gjll is so named because of the noise with which it resounds, then we could hardly find a better model for it than Eilífr’s river. In Skáldskaparmál’s prose retelling of the same narrative, however, Snorri calls the river which Þórr crosses Vimur, and adds that it is allra á mest (SnE II, 25, ‘greatest of all rivers’).⁴⁸ Snorri does not mention that this river Vimur is noisy, or that it flows with stones or any other objects. And so it seems unlikely that Snorri regarded Vimur and Gjll as being mutually identifiable, or even structurally analogous; nonetheless it is of course possible that the description of the river in Þórsdrápa is the sole surviving description of a noisy mythological river connected with the otherworld, to which the name Gjll could be an indistinct allusion.

It is possible that Snorri (or his source) was thinking of more than one underworld river, and combining their features, but that is hardly a conclusive argument. While Grímnismál provided the name, there is little evidence to suggest that the river Gjll formed a barrier or border to the land of Hel in pre-Christian thought in the way that it does in Gylfaginning. Snorri provides too little detail positively to identify the features of this watercourse as part of the Christian tradition but, once again, it is just as closely paralleled in Latin uisiones as in Old Norse mythological texts.