If you stroll through the cemeteries of the Viking Age today, unthreateningly gentle landscapes of grass-covered mounds that can make a nice place for a picnic, you might do well to recall Angantyr’s island and its night-time terrors of funeral fire, open graves at the gates of Hel. Hervör did not flinch in crossing this boundary, but on the other hand, her story is not a happy one.
