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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

> One interesting and obscure connection is the origin of the words "hell" and "hall", as "hall" means "covered place" and "valhalla" means "hall of the dead" from Old Norse.

It's not clear what connection you have in mind. You could make the case that "hell" and "hall" are connected to each other through their ancient ancestry, but "hell" is no more closely related to "valhalla" than it is to "hall". "Valhalla" is just a word that includes "hall".

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Valhǫll in Old Norse comes from valr and hǫll -- literally "hall of dead warriors". Hǫll is reconstructed in Proto-Germanic as hallō, itself from the Proto-Indo-European root ḱel, meaning "to cover".

Consider the Norse Hel (both the underworld and the name of the deity ruling over it). Compare with Old English hell, from Proto-Germanic haljō, from Proto-Indo-European ḱelnó, "room", in turn from the root ḱel -- "to cover".

Consider that languages don't develop in isolation, and both the pre-conquest inhabitatns of the Isles and the Saxons had regular interactions with the Norse, where its religious/spiritual connotations could very easily have just become a cognate.

That's interesting! My personal folk-etymological conjecture had long been that "val" had had a proto-germanic sense of "big", leading to to other modern words like Walroß or Walfisch.

Your comment sent me on a brief etymological excursion and the words sadly are indeed utterly unrelated.

I still can't tell what point you want to make. English hell and Norse Hel are the same thing. But Norse Hel and Norse Valhalla aren't, unless you want to trace them back to proto-Indo-European *kel. There's not a connection between hell and Valhalla.

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