Note 26 — CANTO III. THOR IN HELHEIM.
William Edward Frye translation
The Hell of the Christians is always represented by theologians as a place of eternal fire; yet in the country where the religion of Odin prevailed, the inhabitants, from ancient custom, could not refrain from considering it sometimes as a place of eternal cold. At least, the idea sometimes breaks out in the ballads composed long after the introduction of Christianity. In a Scottish ballad, for instance, inserted by Walter Scott in his “Minstrelsey of the Scottish Border,” there is the following stanza:
O whaten a mountain is yon, she said, All so dreary wi’ frost and snow? O yon is the mountain of Hell, he cried, Where you and I must go.