Hel — the one true spelling, and the forms that fail it
Court is in session. In the matter of Hel, the register hears the evidence — the attestation, the marks, and the forms that stand accused.
At a Glance
- Canonical form: Hel
- Original script: ᚼᛁᛚ
- Pantheon: Norse
- Convention: normalized Old Norse spelling — þ, ð, ǫ, æ and length marks preserved as the editions print them
- False forms on record: 0
- Contested forms: none attested
- Series: The Canonical Register, No. 150 of 397
The Charge
That the name Hel is routinely written in forms that move, drop, or invent its marks — and that each such form teaches the reader a different, lesser name. The register's task is to separate the honest fallback from the outright false.
The Defense of the Canonical Form
The attested form is ᚼᛁᛚ, from the tradition's own record. The canonical transliteration is Hel.
No diacritics are required here: the canonical form is the exactness of the spelling itself, the form normalized Old Norse spelling — þ, ð, ǫ, æ and length marks preserved as the editions print them demands.
The Character Witness
The plain form hel differs from the canonical Hel only by convention of display — case, not content. It is acceptable everywhere: in legacy systems, in plain-text citation, in the DNS itself. What is not acceptable is what follows in the register: respellings that change the letters, not just their case.
Mitigating Circumstances
No alternate form of this name carries documented scholarly support in the lexicon's record. The convention here — normalized Old Norse spelling — þ, ð, ǫ, æ and length marks preserved as the editions print them — produces exactly one defensible transliteration: Hel. Forms that differ from it are not contested; they are simply wrong.
The Convention's Own History
Old Norse orthography is a primary source in itself: þ (thorn) and ð (eth) are letters the language used natively, not transliteration marks — English once had them too, and lost them. ǫ (o with ogonek) is a nasal vowel with its own saga-era history, and normalized Old Norse spelling preserves it because the Eddas' editors do. To write th for þ or o for ǫ is not modernization; it is a different spelling of a different word. The Eddic poems survive in one manuscript tradition each — the register spells the names the way those manuscripts do.
Registration, Honestly
Three facts govern every domain this project registers. One: IDNA 2008 welcomes the marks — punycode encodes them legally and browsers show them faithfully. Two: welcome is not availability — registrars hold partial inventory, so the ideal form of a name may exist in the protocol yet not in the shop window today. Three: typeability is a separate virtue — a form no one can type on a phone is a form no one will visit, however canonical.
Hence the hierarchy the rulebook enforces: take the most complete form that is both attested and actually registrable, and never accept a wrong mark for the sake of availability. The wrong accent is not a rung on that ladder; it is off the ladder entirely.
The Verdict
So the register finds: Hel, canonical; hel, equally canonical; the contested forms, recorded with their support; the false forms, ruled against with their violations named. Every line of that finding cites its evidence, and the evidence is open to any reader — the register asks to be checked, not trusted. The temple keeps the canonical form at /sites/hel/.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 6 cited sources — Poetic Edda: Vafþrúðnismál 43 (the nine worlds below Niflhel; men dying out of Hel), Grímnismál 31 (Hel dwelling beneath one root of Yggdrasill), and Baldrs draumar (the benches strewn and the mead brewed for Baldr), Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda: Gylfaginning 34 (Loki's children; Hel cast into Niflheimr; the hall Éljúðnir and its named fittings; her half-blue appearance) and 49 (Hermóðr's errand and the weeping condition), Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum, Book 1 (Proserpina's promise to Balderus; Hading's journey under the earth), trans. Peter Fisher, ed. Hilda Ellis Davidson.
The Register Continues
The register holds 397 entries like this one — each temple with its own ruling. Read the temple's founding dispatch for the story, its Restoration File for the philology, its Resonance File for the industries, or the whole archive end to end.
Continue the register — previous entry: Hekátē (read it) · next entry: Helénē (read it).
The Canonical Register is written from the same canonical record as the lexicon itself. If a false form is missing from this page, it is because the evidence does not support calling it false — or because we have not seen it yet. Show us, with a citation, and the register will answer.