Gone Medieval - The Invention of Hell

Episode Date: September 15, 2026

"All hope, abandon ye who enter here." These words from Dante’s Divine Comedy may shape our modern vision of hell, but did you know that the Bible says surprisingly little about it? In fact, hell as we know it was constantly reinvented during the Middle Ages.Dr. Eleanor Janega is joined by Dr. Stephen Hopkins as they descend into the medieval underworld to uncover how apocryphal texts, localised mythologies, and religious anxieties shaped the terrifying, and occasionally hopeful, realms of the afterlife.MOREHow to Get to Heaven: Papal IndulgencesListen on AppleListen on SpotifyMedieval ApocalypseListen on AppleListen on SpotifyGone Medieval is presented by Dr. Eleanor Janega. Edited by Amy Haddow, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcastHistory Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™Want even MORE history? Watch Eleanor and Matt's new film Medieval Summer on History Hit. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week, PLUS early access ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanorianaga and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes, to the Crusades. We delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were. And how we got here.

All hope, abandon ye who enter here. Those famous words from Dante's Divine Comedy have helped shape how generations of people have imagined hell. A vast, terrifying realm of fire and punishment, were sinners. are tortured for eternity, and demons lurk in the darkness. But Dante didn't invent hell. And much of the classic fire and brimstone schick doesn't come from the Bible. In fact, scripture says surprisingly little about what hell actually looks like. So where did it come from?

Like most things, the answer is the Middle Ages. In the early medieval period, New Christians searching for answers on the afterlife turned to a host of different stories and traditions. Apocryphal texts like the vision of St. Paul and the Gospel of Nicodemus proved hugely popular. They offered new and surprising visions of the afterlife, becoming the medieval equivalent of New York Times bestsellers. And as these stories traveled across medieval Europe, they changed. Irish writers wove Christian teaching about the afterlife together with their own ancient traditions.

Old Norse authors imagined Christ's descent into hell through the mythology of their own world. And in England and Wales, poets turned the underworld on its head, imagining hopeful hells, where even the damned might one day rise again. Hell, it seems, was not one fixed place. It was being reinstated.

fented constantly. I'm Dr. Eleanor Yaniga, and this is Gone Medieval. Today, we're descending into the medieval underworld to uncover how the hell we think we know came to be. And to help guide us down into the deep, dark depths. I'm thrilled to be joined by Stephen Hopkins, assistant professor of English literature at the University of Virginia, and author of the amazing new book, Translating Hell, vernacular theology and apocrypha in the medieval North Sea.

Stephen, welcome to God Medieval. Thanks so much. I'm excited to be here. I'm really excited to have you here because I loved this book. I'm obsessed with this book. Everyone stop what you're doing and go read this book. But if you aren't going to stop listening to this, go ahead and listen first and then go read it. But I think that I'm obsessed with hell, right?

I'm obsessed with depictions of hell at the back of my business card is the hell fresco in the Bologna Cathedral. You know, for me, this is, this is one of my big medieval loves. I think it's interesting because I think there's a tendency for us to think that they are particularly obsessed with hell. And maybe actually it's us kind of being obsessed with it and going to look for it. But I mean, is it fair to say that they're quite interested in it or is this just sort of the stuff that hangs around, I guess?

I think that's a fair question. I think it's good to interrogate our biases, right, and ask, like, are we projecting on the Middle Ages? That's always a good move. Although I will say that in this case, I don't think the stereotype is totally wrong. If we want to imagine the, like, medieval people as sort of morbidly obsessed with hell, I think I would quibble with the morbid part, but not necessarily the obsessed part. I think that's fair.

You see manuscript images with lots of hell mouths. you see all sorts of texts about hell, some of the medieval bestsellers. I mean, like Dante is sort of the culmination of this tradition, Ferno especially, is a tour of hell. So, yeah, I think it's fair to say that they are extremely interested in hell.

And I'm getting at why, I think might help us understand why I would say, maybe not morbidly, but definitely. Well, I guess that brings me on to my next question because you mentioned the inferno, which again,

you know, completely guilty of being upset. with that particular text. And I think that it has done this great job of molding the way that we think about hell and the way that we talk about it. But how is hell depicted in artwork or literature in the medieval period more generally? Because there isn't really one size fits all you. Certainly, I love to see a hellmouth. I'm excited every time I see one. They're absolutely brilliant. But presumably, that's something that comes in at a point in time, no? Yes, that's right.

I mean, again, I think it's worth remembering that, you know, Dante might be an iconic medieval writer, but he's right at the end of the Middle Ages, basically. If you run into someone who studies Italy, they're going to say, actually, you know, he's either the last medieval author or the first Renaissance author, you know, something like that. So he's like right on that cusp. He sort of summarizes and synthesizes the traditions that came before. And he does it, you know, magnificently. But before him in the centuries prior to that. You know, hell's depiction varies by region. There's all sorts of local influences that go into how hell is depicted.

Sometimes, you know, it's drawn as, like we said, a hellmouth full of souls that are sort of seething in this mouth like you see in the Winchester's altar. Or sometimes it's a hellmouth, like a beast's head, and you see Christ pulling Adam and Eve out of it, you know, for the harrowing of hell. It might be more like Bosch, where you see a bunch of naked people who are being tortured and very color. full and stomach churning ways, you know, demons are poking them with pitchforks and things like that. Those images really exist. It could be, you know, one of my favorites is actually the hours of Catherine of Cleaves where hell, like the gates of hell are depicted as a giant cat's face. And I mean, I have a cat, so that checks out. Yeah. So often what I think I love about this project in general and why I study it is they're often remaking hell in their own.

image or in ways that speak to very local interests and concerns. There's not like a monolithic depiction of it per se. There are some details that float that get shared across. But for the most, like, fire is important. But there's a lot of room for customization. Fire is important. Sometimes weird little guys are important. I love a demon.

I like to see a demon. I like it when the hell mouth has legs. That really does it for me. I lose it when the hell mouth is a little guy who's walking around. Fantastic stuff. Yeah. Yeah, the Hellmouth might be English in origin, and it seems to emerge from English manuscripts first. And there's at least a theory out there that it starts as a whale, actually, which if you are really into your obscure Christian medieval exegesis makes sense because.

And I am. I mean, even, you know, Christ himself in the gospel says that he's about to, I'm paraphrasing, obviously, but he says he's about to pull a Jonah, which means that, he is crucified and goes to hell, he is going to, he actually says, you know, he will have the sign of Jonah, which means he's going to go into the underworld, which is, you know, allegorically, the whale that Jonah gets swallowed by, and he's going to be down there for three days like Jonah or a while, and then he gets spat out. So he references that prophecy. So, so there's this sort of exegetical tradition where, like, the whale is a metaphor for hell, and then people start drawing that beast. And sometimes, you know, especially I love the first person perspectives of these that are really strange where the beast's face is kind of like flattened.

Yeah. So it starts looking. It starts out as being a whale and then it stops looking like a whale. And then people are like, well, we can just make it whatever animal we want to, a lion or something intimidating. Dragon. You know, and fair enough. I like to see. I like the dragon ones a lot.

But I just like to see a dragon. So that's fair enough. But well, you mentioned exegesis. And I think that it is important to kind of take it right. back to the Bible. What's the Bible got to say about hell? Fun trick question. Exactly. That's really the thing. I mean, that question is basically what got me started on this path in the first place. Early in grad school, I was reading Dante's Divine Comedy, as you do. And, you know, it wasn't the first time I'd read it, but it was, you know, I was in grad school.

I was paying attention in new ways. And I just wondered, how did we get from the hands? handful of scriptures that say anything about hell to this rich, complex tradition, like this symbol, there's so much symbolism and symmetry, so many gory details in Dante. None of that's in the Bible. There's really only half a dozen or so verses in the New Testament, especially. I think it's worth separating the New Testament from the Hebrew scriptures or what medieval Christians would have thought of as their Old Testament. There's really only a half a dozen verses in the New Testament that unambiguously refer to

hell. Many of them are spoken by Christ. And many of those are in parables. So like, how literally are you supposed to take them? So, you know, he says something about how there is darkness and fire, how there is a worm that devours them. He talks about the sheep and the goats being separated in Matthew 25 and 26 at the final judgment, you know. So the goats are the people who didn't take care of the poor, didn't visit people in jail, didn't take care of the sick and things like that. They're cast into the outer darkness where there's wailing and gnashing of teeth. But that's It's not very specific. There's also a parable about a rich man and Lazarus, who is a poor man who's always lived

in front of the rich man's gates. And the rich man spent his whole life ignoring this person who clearly needed help. And so when they both die, the rich man finds himself in a fiery place and he's miserable. And apparently he can even see Lazarus across this chasm. And he's begging Lazarus to just give me one drop of water. But Christ's parable sort of implies that that gulf is unpacked. And so, yeah, again, there aren't very many details. Like there's just these few little touchstones that sort of obliquely hint at that there's

this fate that awaits a lot of people after death. It's going to be really uncomfortable, probably going to have something to do with fire and worms eating you. But there's not like, there's not a lot of specifics about duration, location, or any like specific tortures or anything like that. And I think that this is a really important point because. fundamentally the idea of hell almost it's sort of like a folk thing that that kind of builds up over time and medieval people do my favorite thing i love i love biblical exegesis right you know my entire phogeesis is about you know a preacher's weird apocrypha and the things that he likes to find in the danieline prophecies right so what i love to watch medieval people do is how they comb around in the bible for hints at things and then they blow it up into something huge as a result of these tiny, tiny little hints.

But there's also a whole world of, I suppose, apocrypha of like pseudo-biblical texts that are also feeding these ideas, right? Yeah, exactly. And I think what you're pointing to, like that pattern is the fact that these are smart people who are doing intelligent close reading. They're paying attention to the Bible and taking the stories in it seriously. And so when the canonical account, you sort of implies something or has weird details in it that are unlike what we see in real life, it's natural to have questions about them. Adam lives to be 930. What's that life like? What do you do for that long, for God's sake?

You know? And then lo and behold, there are Apocrypha that kind of answer that question. So again, same for hell. Hell is very, very thinly sketched. Could we hear more about that? It seems kind of important. La-la. Apocrypha appear to fill that gap. And that's really, you know, for listeners who are unfamiliar with the term apocrypha, they're non-canonical scriptures.

So they look and sound like the canonical scriptures. They're written in many of the same genres, epistles, gospels, things like that, Apocalypse, but they were not universally revered or held as divinely inspired or authoritative. Or maybe they were temporarily or in some traditions, but not all, right? So they look and sound like scripture. They're not. And this leads to a really interesting dynamic that I think you gesture at. That is that they occupy what I would say is a liminal space in medieval taxonomies of knowledge,

which is just a jargony way of saying they're in between. They look and sound like scripture. So some people felt free to revere them. If you don't have many books to read in general, the gospel of Nicodemus does sound a lot like the canonical gospels, especially because it borrows so many verses straight from them. So on the one hand, some people felt free to revere Apocrypha, but because they're not actually scripture, some people felt free to revise them. And if I'd make changes to the gospel of Nicodemus, what's to stop you as an intelligent reader from taking my changes as gospel truth? This sort of process allows Apocrypha to answer questions that the canonical scriptures can't.

But then what I love is there is sort of a snowball effect where you may have answered one question, but your answer is weird enough that it raised 10 more. And thank God for that, right? Or medieval historians, we'd have nothing to do, right? So we love that. For my personal employment, that's really great. Yeah, I know, right? We need that. You've got to keep me busy somehow.

Idle hands, et cetera, you know, but. So within your book, you kind of winnow it down. There's sort of two incredibly important apocryphal texts that really feed into the invention of hell. And what are those? So I focused on the Gospel of Nicodemus and the Vision of St. Paul in particular. These are two texts that are wildly popular in the Latin tradition, especially. If you look at like, you know, there's a, there's an organization called NASCAR.

It's one of the longest acronyms ever with the North American Society for the study of Christian apocryphal literature. You can edit out if you want. But, you know, we have this online database of apocrypha that viewers could go out and check out if they want to. And it lists over 300 entries. Like there's more than 300 New Testament Christian Apocrypha. Only a few of those are about hell. But when you think about manuscript attestation and which texts are copied most often, you know, use that as a metric for popularity,

it's a no-brainer to focus on these two apocrypha about hell. The Gospel of Nicodemus survives in more than 450 manuscripts and the vision of St. Paul survives in more than 400. Compare that to like Bayelwolf's one. Right. These were ubiquitous. And that's just what survives, you know, scholars sometimes say that like 90% or 95% of what was produced in the Middle Ages is lost in terms of manuscripts. So like, who knows? They were everywhere. And that's because people were curious and they had questions about the afterlife and they wanted these answers. Now, I focus on these two texts in particular because they offer very different stories about hell. I would say that they're basically the good cop and the bad cop of hell. Right. The gospel of Nicodemus is the good cop hell. It has good news for you from hell.

And the vision of St. Paul is the bad cop hell. It is there to scare the hell out of you or scare you out of hell, I guess. So the vision of St. Paul, we'll start with that one. It's a very early text. It seems to be an evolution of an earlier Greek apocryphal text called the Apocalypse of Peter, where Peter is shown heaven and hell. but it sort of peters out. Paul steals his thunder. It gets translated into Latin and the Pauline version becomes extremely popular in the West.

So in the vision of St. Paul, Paul basically is taken on a tour of heaven and hell. And it's not very, it's not unlike what we see in Dante. In fact, Dante borrows a sort of shape of his vision from this particular vision. But in hell, this is the first time where we see sort of symmetrical punishments for sin. We see Paul sees people hanging from a tree by their tongues. You know, they're nailed through their tongues and they're naked and they're on fire. And Paul is like, what the heck is that? And his guardian angel, his psycho pomp, says, oh, those sinners were people who were liars.

That's why they're hanging from their tongues, right? Or he sees people immersed up to their belly buttons, the text says, in fire. And of course, the Latin umbilicus there is a polite euphemism for the regions, very close to your belly button that would get you in trouble for fornication. And the angel says, those were the fornicators. That's why they're there. So we see this symmetrical version of God's divine justice. Whatever sin got you in hell, your hell is going to mirror that sin in some way.

So that's the vision of St. Paul. It is basically the proto-dante tour of hell. And it seems to be designed to, like I said, scare people away from the bad behavior that puts you in hell. It's the turn or burn apocrypha, if you will. I don't know if the viewers around the world will be familiar with that terminology. But yeah, but it's repent or go to hell, turn or burn. Whereas the gospel of Nicodemus actually starts with, I think the premise of it is basically another one of these smart questions that people might have about the gospel narratives.

You know, as a kid, I remember thinking, wow, Easter is full of all these interesting holidays for like every day of the week. We have Good Friday. We have Easter Sunday. What happened on Saturday? Why don't we have anything going on there? What was Christ doing? Was he asleep in the tomb?

And so the Gospel of Nicodemus also answers to that question. No, he was not just in there twiddling his thumbs. He actually left his body and went down to hell and smashed the gates of hell and liberated all the Old Testament or Hebrew scripture prophets and patriarchs. So basically all the Old Testament main characters, if you were worried about them, they can't logically go to heaven because they were all lived before the incarnation,

before the crucifixion and all of that. It doesn't seem very fair for them to be trapped in hell, but it also doesn't seem logically like there should be anywhere else for them to go yet. So this text resolves that conflict shows Christ going down and doing what we call the harrowing of hell, right, which is a word that comes from old English. It basically means like a military raid, right? Like Vikings might harrow or harry the English countryside. So Christ harrow's hell.

He kicks down, smashes the. the gates of hell, and he leads out all of these Old Testament figures by the hand, and then he comes back just in time for Easter Sunday service. Well, I really like the harrowing of hell. This is one of these things that I'm quite interested in, but I think it's, again, one of these things that happens when you're a medieval historian who is interested in exegesis, because medieval scholars are really attached to the concept of the harrowing of hell because they are desperate to get Aristotle out of hell.

they don't want Aristotle and Plato down there right and so they're like no I'm sure J.C. came and it's not their fault it's not their fault that they were pagans and it's an interesting one because you know Dante very firmly he's got this vision of the worthy

pagans they are in hell but they're in the bit that it's that oh it's not your fault part but you do see a lot yeah he makes it the Limbus potrum right and then they all came and they all told me that I was as good as them like yeah sure they did buddy Okay, but I do really enjoy seeing these scholastics wrestle,

and they want their philosophers out of hell. And so I really appreciate the heroine for that. But I think that's what's really interesting, is that, you know, these apocrypha allow for people with different cultures or different priorities to relate to hell in different ways. Yeah, exactly. Again, since hell is so thinly sketched, it winds up being very malleable.

You can reshape it to address all sorts of cultural needs or concerns that, you know, someone in the first century wouldn't have made any sense to them. But because there's so little to go off of, as long as you include the fire and the punishment part, you can, there's room for creativity there. Absolutely. But in the book, you cover Ireland really extensively, which I simply love to see, always. And it's really interesting to look at Ireland because they're one of these first regional places to convert, like as opposed to, you know, just the conversion within the Roman Imperium more, more largely. So how do we see early Christians there reacting to the Apocrypha?

Are there any particular Irish-flavored adaptations that we see? Yeah, that's a hard question. but especially because they convert so early, you know, it's the tail end of the Roman Empire when St. Patrick is doing his thing. I think Patrick probably would have thought of himself as a Roman citizen, basically. So, oh, God, yeah. Yeah. So, like, we don't have eyewitness accounts of how they react. What we have are stories that are, you know, a couple of centuries later, like from the sevens, eight hundreds, nine hundreds, talking about Druids confronting St. Patrick.

At any rate, what we can answer about your question is how did the Irish react to Apocrypha in general? and what do they do what do they use hell to do one of the most fascinating things about studying early irish writing right old middle irish is that they basically have the biggest storehouse of apocrypha of pretty much anyone in the middle ages and they specialize in collecting exotic apocrypha too we don't totally understand how and why it's still a very open question in scholarship but sometimes like we will find apocryphal texts attested in old irish and only in syria. or only in Coptic. And we are like, how did that text get there without intermediaries? We don't totally know. It seems it's hard to prove because it was so long ago and so little survives. And also like Rome was busy doing its, you know, crumbling thing. But it seems like, you know, at the very least we could say that these pan-Mediterranean

networks of contact were still at least somewhat intact by the five and six hundreds when texts somehow moved across, maybe through Spain, up to Ireland. It's somewhat controversial to say that, but it's definitely a thing. So in the book, I jokingly call the Irish Doomsday Preppers. They're collecting all these apocrypha to help them prepare for Doomsday. They're very worried about the second coming of Christ. They've converted early enough that there's still a very large school of Christians who think that basically following St. Augustine, you know, the idea that there are seven days of

world history, just as there were seven days of creation. When Christ came back from the dead, that started day. which means that we are in the last day, which is fun because, you know, here we are still talking about the last day, about more than a thousand years later, right? It's a long day. But yeah, so they saw themselves as like in the final day, Christ could come back any minute. We need to be ready, just like the parable says. It could be in the middle of the night, like a thief in the night. So Apocrypha were one way for them to get ready because, you know, they were studying scriptures fastidiously and they had lots of questions and they couldn't be answered by the

canonical texts. And so they start amassing the, you know, this storehouse of strange apocrypha. There are apocrypha in Irish that are not, there's no parallels anywhere else for them. So maybe they made them up in Tengabith Nua is the ever new tongue. And it's the only text that tells us that Philip was martyred by having his tongue cut out out out. And so he could keep preaching. So they cut it out again. And then it grew back. So he kept preaching. And then they cut it out again. I think it's nine times. That story is unparalleled. You know, they say ninth times a charm, you know. Yeah, seriously. It's bad. I've burned my tongue on a hot pocket, right?

This is again and again. This is a serious martyrdom. At any rate, so they have all these apocrypha about hell specifically, and what I find fascinating is if you look at what texts they gravitate towards, I think that they were sort of preoccupied with questions about who is delivered at the harrowing of hell. Or another way to think about it is how far does God's mercy really go? Or another way to think about it is, is there a purpose to hell? Is it, you know, mindless sadism?

Is it just punishment forever for the sake of punishment? Or is there a recuperative aspect to it? They get this question from origin, a church father, you know, in the second, third century, who is asking these sorts of questions and, you know, to later authorities like Augustine, sort of smacks of universalism. But origin famously asks, can even Judas be saved? And so what we see in Irish apocrypha is they take up that question quite literal. there's a whole bunch of apocrypha about Judas and about whether he can get to hell, whether

he stays in hell and how he's treated afterwards because he's the arch sinner. So he's sort of the test case, the logical test case for like what happens to the absolute worst person who was ever born, like if anyone deserved to be in hell. Surely it's the guy who sold Jesus for pocket change. And one of my favorite instances of this is in the Lever Break book of homilies, which is actually 14th century, but it has a lot of older material in it. Or maybe it's 15th century. Yeah, sorry, it's actually 15th century and it has older material in it. But there's a homily about Judas where he somehow seems to know that the harrowing of hell is coming.

Like, this is set during Good Friday. The crucifixion has happened. And in the text, he knows that the harrowing of hell is coming. I guess Christ spilled the beans on that one. And so he deliberately, the text says he deliberately hangs himself. so that he can hurry up and get to hell before Christ, because he is under the impression that when Christ gets to hell, Christ is going to let everyone out.

So he is, I mean, it's basically like Wiley Coyote and Roadrunner here. He is trying to trick Jesus into letting him out of hell even after what he did. But Jesus is very clever. And he finds out about this. And the text says that he freezes Judas's soul and stasis. And just long enough so that he can finish the harrowing of hell.

And then he unfreezes Judas just in time for. Judas to go into hell and then the gates of hell slam shot behind him and he's the first soul that's trapped forever in hell. Well, ha ha. Well, that'll show him. It's interesting how to watch these very intricate explanations because it's sort of like people are really wanting, you know, like revenge on Judas. And I think it's an interesting question when we are considering hell, right?

And what it's for, right? And so here, the answer there is, yeah, mindless punishment, revenge. Yeah, that that is what we want. We're not looking to redeem Judas or anyone else. And that's just simply not what's going on here, right? And apparently enough people were like worried about that, that someone bothered to write a homily about it, to address it. You can sort of hear the latent interest in universalism. And, and, you know, my book chapter talks about other instances that seem to suggest that there were at least some people in Ireland who really thought that everyone would be saved. ultimately. Now, Judas may deserve it, but there are other texts that really take up the question of, you know, just how awful it would be to witness vast swaths of humanity being tormented brutally forever and ever. And it seems that that was too much for some people to take. So on the one hand, yeah, Judas might deserve it, but it's also hard for us as humane humans to look at that and think like, what kind of loving God would allow that? so there's a lot of tensions at play at once.

Within the Irish canon as well and the sort of like the way they look at these things, do we also see anything particularly culturally Irish come out of this in terms of these conceptions? I mean, I suppose here I'm kind of thinking

more particularly about discussions of vengeance because we do know that there's kind of you know, an Irish tendency, for example, on the death of kings to seek vengeance, right? And do you think that that comes into play when Irish people are then talking about hell? Yeah.

So there's a there's a poet called Blathmog who is writing in the 8th century. It's one of our earliest old Irish poets. And he, this is what I would, this is why I called my book translating hell. He takes the idea of the harrowing of hell. He takes that narrative and translates it, not just from Latin into old Irish, but culturally, he does what I call localizes it. He talks about sort of the injustice of the crucifixion. You know, Christ is the only sinless man who ever lived. So logically, original sin didn't apply to him.

He did not deserve to die, period. But then there's the extra layer on top of the injustice of slaying someone who was so good and only wanted to bring good things to humanity. The poet Blathmog winds up talking about him. I mean, he calls him a king. He doesn't, this isn't thinly veiled metaphor or anything. He calls him my king, and he says that it's a grave injustice that his king was murdered. And then what's interesting and frankly, I always find it disheartening to read, is that once Blavmag's king is slain,

Blavmag launches into this huge, long, hundreds of lines of just invective against the Jews and against Jerusalem as a city, the people that he holds personally responsible for murdering his king. And he basically, you know, he mines Josephus and Eusebius for sort of the horrors of what happened during the 70C.E. Siege of Jerusalem under Titus Invispation. And he basically lists those off very gleefully and says, you know, they deserved every bit of this because they murdered my king. And it basically is invoking the sort of logic of how you would have been a king in medieval Ireland. I find that, As you say, it is incredibly disheartening, but it's also one of these things where I always have to remind myself when I'm looking at those things that this is sort of our job as historians is to sit with this discomfort. And, you know, I'm often like, no, medieval people, they're my weird little friends.

And they say something like this and I'm like, hmm. I don't love it. Yeah, maybe not. Yeah. Maybe not that one. So it's beyond. Yeah, I was totally viving with Blavmog for a while. then he made it weird

yeah he did it got odd right well so what happens in turn with this the ongoing translation right so we've got the apocrypha and this notion of hell what happens when it comes into contact with the English right because they also seem to have a pretty

lively interest in apocrypha as well I think that that's fair to say I think that's fair to say I think that's fair to say as well, if you are anything like me. You often find yourself reading old English homilies on a weekend night, right? Because that's a party.

Yeah, yeah, I am cool. Thanks. Thanks for noticing, Stephen. I'm sure all of our listeners find that deeply relatable. But yeah, it's, if you read homilies, for real, you'll see that a lot of them, like a lot of them have a similar rhetorical pattern where they talk about whatever scripture or passage that week is based on. And then they, again, do the turn or burn move rhetorically where they're like, I know we've been talking about this one thing, but let's also talk about hell and why you need to basically look to the cross and get your crap together so that you don't wind up going there. All praise too and glory to Christ.

Amen. And so like in general, like that's in the air is sort of hell exists in their rhetorical world specifically to call people to repentance. It's often used that way in their homilies. But they are very interested in thinking about hell in local terms that evoke, again, not unlike what. Bladmak is doing, although it plays out differently because of the cultural logic, they want to think about God as their king or their affling, their ruler. And so you get like the old English vision of St. Paul. That's just a fragment, unfortunately. We don't have the whole thing in old English, but the fragment treats the part early in the vision of St. Paul, where it turns out that we all have

guardian angels who watch over us day and night. And every evening, the guardian angels go up to God to Narc on us, basically. And tell God. God, all of our sins. It's not good, is it? They're like, oh, yeah, I was watching. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're miserable. I mean, they hate this job because we suck.

And in the old English version of this, it's, you know, it's actually in the Latin as well, but the various parts of the creation of the cosmos, the constituent, the citizens of the cosmos, the Earth, the moon, the stars, they all have their complaints against humanity as well. And the Earth basically says, like, I see these horrible people doing horrible things. every day. They're sleeping with each other. They're being too fruitful, if you know what I mean. So God, will you please let me withhold my fruits so that they can just starve to death? And all the elements of creation also have their own little custom complaints and want to kill us in equally poetically fitting ways. And God just responds the same way every time in this text. He says,

I hear you. It's bad. It's hard to watch. But I'm having patience for them so that they have time to repent so that as many of them can repent as possible. But then I'll come back and judge them with the heart of the stoned dome, he says in old English, with the harshest doom or judgment. And so we basically get a reenactment of an early medieval English like court scene. This is how court would have worked if you were suing someone who had done you wrong in the kingdom. You go to your local lord and you present your complaints. And then it's up to the Lord's dome, his judgment, to disdain. To decide how justice is going to be meted out. So a lot of the terminology used in that translation really resonates with some of their legal terms in ways that would speak to them,

I think, specifically, and they would find particularly interesting. It reassures them that God works like one of their own best judges, one of their own best lords. So it sort of comforts them in that way, which I think is really interesting. That's just, that's one, I would say, rather conventional use of hell in Old English, but it's fun to see the sheer variety of uses that they find for hell because that's just one. Yeah, because a bead gets into the act, right? Like not even the venerable bead is even even even bead. He's just like me.

He wants to hang out. He wants to talk about hell, right? Yeah, I have that thought all the time. He's just funny. Yeah, no, I was delighted when I was reading the ecclesiastical history and right at the end, you know, Beed sort of has this reputation for being a sober-minded. historian who, you know, for the 8th century, at least, is a better historian than anyone else around at the time.

Again, just like us. Just like us. Yeah. Yeah. He does his homework. He actually tries to verify his sources. And so in general, I think we assume that Bid is not sensationalistic. I mean, he does get caught up in his own rhetoric and drama sometimes.

But who amongst us does not, right? At any rate, I was pleasantly surprised and shocked to find that at the end of the ecclesiastiesiesies, historical history. He makes the same rhetorical move that so many old English homilies does. Turner Burn. He brings up three visions of hell that he claims real people in his day really had. So these are basically visions of the afterlife. This is someone who dies or one of them actually dies and sees a vision of hell and he comes back. And which, you know, this genre still exists today fascinatingly enough in certain circles of American Christianity. And be, be it, he says, you know, this, this man came back and he saw hell.

And even though he was already a good guy before he died, Drichtholm decides to sell all of his worldly possessions and divide his entire property into three parts, which is something that your family does with your estate after you die. But he basically, symbolically declares his death to the world. He's going to spend the rest of his days in a monastery being extra, extra devout, even though he had already been pretty devout by any standard. And he gives the money a third of it. I think he gives a portion to his wife, portion to his kids, and then a third to the poor. So that he is left with absolutely nothing but his pure devotion to God. That's one of them. That's the happy one.

There is a drunken carpenter who shall not be named, Bede says, who was given to too much drink and game. And basically it sounds like he doesn't say this, but to me it sounds like the monastery couldn't really stand this guy. And they just kept him around because he was really freaking good at making sculptures. And anyway, so this jerk also has a near-death experience. And he reacts differently. He seems to believe in weird. He seems to believe in fate. He seems to think that he cannot escape his fate.

So he sees a vision where demons are like standing at his head and his feet. And they've got these like burning blades that they're cutting into him from both extremes. And they're moving towards his middle towards his belly button. They're going to saw him in half slowly. And he sees that vision And instead of taking it as a warning, he's like, that's my fate. I can't help it.

I'm going to go to hell. And he refuses to repent all the way to the bitter end. And so Bede says that they take his body and bury it at the extreme north of the churchyard where only the most cursed criminals are buried because north is traditionally the direction of hell. I find that that really interesting because I'm very, what of like my particular pet interest is the sort of invention of purgatory. and the ideas or visions of a hopeful hell, right? So, you know, purgatory being more or less hell with a timer

where you sort of learn your lesson and you burn off the bad things so that you can become better, right? But this sort of posits a sort of person who feels the exact opposite. That's never possible. There's never going to be a way of expiating your sin. So you may as well just go for it. Like get drunk now because maybe the rest of eternity is getting sought in half, I guess. Yeah, I mean, it's like it's Bede's way of epitomizing, I think the sin of despair is what it's been called in different times and places.

The idea that, you know, it's basically Dr. Faustus. He knows what's coming. He's heard about hell and sin and punishment. And he feels like he can't change. And so rather than having faith or hope or joy or any of the other fruits of the spirit, he just get wallows in it, right? and just says, I know what my fate is. I can't be saved. Which various church authorities weighed in on that.

But that's another way of saying that Christ's sacrifice isn't enough for me. Like somehow my sin is too important to be paid for. And Bid holds this up. And he explicitly says, like, learn from this guy's example, right? It's never too late unless you want it to be. And maybe he just did, you know, like, what can I say? So what do we see to, in terms of ideas about how, when we go over to Wales because we have such an incredible literary tradition among the Welsh.

And that really kind of informs the way they write about hell, right? Yeah. So the case in Wales is unique. And frankly, I found that chapter hard to write because so many of my other chapters start with like, well, let's look at their conversion and how they reacted to this new faith. you know, what local identity challenges did Christianity? What identity crisis did it spark for these people? And how do they use hell to like make a custom answer to that problem? That's basically the some of the other book chapters in a nutshell.

In Wales, they also converted very, very, very early, just like the Irish, which makes sense when you think about where Roman Britain was and where Christians and Roman Britain were, they were there. It was them. But unfortunately, we have no writing from Wales that survives before. we have almost no writing that survives before 1,100, which is wildly late. Think about the grand scheme of things. There's a few Latin texts here and there.

But even those, like the lives of the early Welsh saints are pretty much all written in the 11 and 1,200s about people who lived like half a millennium before. So there's so little to go off of in terms of like early reactions. So instead I focused on, well, what that we do have? We do have a lot of writings starting around the 1,100s to 1,200s to 1,200. about the time where, one, we've got the Anglo-Normans rolling in and bullying them constantly. They've finished their dirty work after the conquest in 1066. And so now they're turning their attention to whales and trying to continue to expand.

And they're having a lot of trouble because of the mountains and because of the people. They're building castles all over the place. But along with this French influence in the form of aggression, there's also French influence of courtly ideals, courtly tastes, Courtly romance becomes really popular, and the Welsh can't resist that just like no one else can. Of course, we see that, we see an amazing adaptation of that in the Mabinogi, the four branches of the Mabinogi, which are courtly tales, but they're adaptations of much older Welsh oral tradition and lore. And we don't really know about most of these mythological characters except for from the Mabinogi, which is a very late version. At any rate, at the same time that all of these outside cultural influences are, I guess you could say, being imported, there's also the idea of purgatory is becoming more and more popular. And that is where I think that that's where a lot of our Welsh apocrypha about hell or else just weird stories about hell that maybe not technically apocryful.

But we get weird stories about hell and about purgatory at this time that do some interesting cultural work, I will say. Again, this is the sort of stuff I like. And I was really kind of taken by the legend of Ka, the giant, and, you know, this idea of the hopeful hell that they have. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah. So we get this life of St. Caddag, who goes up to what would, what we would call Scotland while it is still unconverted. And he's trying to do his missionary work. And he's having a hard time.

It's taking longer to convert these people than he wanted it to. So he needs a more permanent base of all. operations. He starts building a monastery and he's doing it by hand and it turns out that is hard to do. So he's digging and he accidentally finds a gigantic collarbone buried in the dirt. And the text tells us that this collarbone is so freaking huge that a horse and a rider can pass through it like a tunnel and they don't have to duck or anything. That's how big this is. And the saint marvels at it as one would. And I like to think he found a dinosaur bone. But, but, um, but he has a, asks God what might this mean? And in a vision that night, an angel tells him, you know, go to sleep.

God will show you what it is. He will raise a giant from the dead tomorrow morning. And that giant will help you build this monastery. So St. Goddeg goes to sleep. And when he wakes up, sure enough, Kyle, this huge giant is standing there. And they have a little conversation before they get to work. And Cadug asks, you know, what's your story? Like, why are you here? Why are you helping me build this? And Cal basically says I was once a native prince and I was very good at warfare and I was very successful. You might have heard of me. Nobody has. But he was a big deal in his day.

And he killed a lot of people. And by all outside metrics, he lived a good life as far as warrior princes are supposed to. Nevertheless, he found himself in hell for his sins. And, you know, he talks about how awful it is. And he says, but then I got this weird offer that if I come back up here and I help you build this monastery, then I can maybe go to heaven. So that's what he does. He starts single-handedly digs, does all the digging. He's a giant.

So it's easy for him. And he helps put the monastery together and the mission is successful. And there's a happy ending for everyone. And then he's allowed to die. And when he does, he gets to go to heaven. So I look at this story, the strange, strange story. And think about, I think it really shows how not only Welsh lords in general, but like how medieval noble people generally could try to have it both ways. They could try to have successful careers as worldly rulers doing the things that worldly rulers do, waging war, kidnapping people, plundering, pillaging, all the fun stuff, all the naughty stuff.

And, you know, none of those things really squares with Christ's teaching to love your neighbor as yourself and take care of the poor and all of that. So it's a bit of an ethical dilemma. It seems like you could maybe either be a noble or you could be a Christian. But a tale like Cowles shows how you might be able to do both. And it really resonates with sort of the shape of a lot of these nobles lives where they do live their secular life, doing secular things, wageing warfare and so on. And then when they die, they leave all a ton of money to the church. And the church uses that to build a monastery or fund a monastery. And voila, now you've got monks who can pray for you and get you out of hell.

And eventually you'll get to go to heaven just like Kyle did. So it's a really interesting way of modeling this option that exists for some very wealthy people, but not everyone. Yeah, well, I mean, I suppose the good thing about it is that most of us aren't going to go to hell because we waged a bunch of war and killed a bunch of people because baby I was just getting the harvest in right like my my people are all peasants we weren't doing that you know that's yeah that's not me okay you can try but I know your guardian angel saw you looking at that other peasant in the field yeah probably right nice try probably right yeah yeah well I could keep going for ages but I suppose we have to eventually wrap up I mean this book is incredible you go over Dante in more detail I really enjoy the section that you do on

old Norse authors grappling with this, but there's no time. You're simply too interesting. So just kind of to help us wrap up, what would you say the medieval tradition of really translating hell, you know, translating hell to different cultures, translating hell literally out of other languages and into one's own, how does this end, right? Because medieval people are really, really into it. They're really into finding these ways of adapting hell for their everyday life and their own culture. I mean, is this a sort of thing that goes out with the Reformation?

Is it that when we have like this larger trans-European culture that is helped along by things like cheap pamphlets? Does that destroy our little local hell? I think. Well, okay. I think what the Reformation does is it reigns on the parade of Apocrypha, specifically. Apocrypha become sort of a minefield in Reformation rhetorical fights over whose version of the Bible is better. You know, you can't trust the Catholics because they've got all these fake books in there is sort of a Protestant polemic. And so the apocrypha in general, like people start to get suspicious of them because all of a sudden their provenance comes into question and people start saying, yeah, who actually wrote those things, right?

And sort of textual scholarship becomes a thing. And so now the pedigrees of these texts are being questioned. and it turns out, of course, Paul didn't write the vision of St. Paul, things like that. So that is sort of a casualty of the Reformation. But I would say that like the idea that we can tell stories about hell and we can make hell speak to modern concerns or contemporary concerns, there's a tradition that's completely active and vibrant today. That depends on which tradition, you know, you're paying attention to.

I can only speak for what I've seen. But in, you know, American circles, there are still writing books about, Oh, there was one that was like a bestseller 10 or 15 years ago called like, like, was it five minutes in hell or something like that about a little boy who died and saw heaven and hell and he comes back and he tells his story and it's supposed to like, again, turn or burn it's supposed to warn you to like get your acts together and take this seriously. Or I think one of my favorite modern adaptations is probably the 2016 remake of Doom where you have someone, his name doesn't rhyme with Elon, but it should. who builds a colony on Mars, and he finds out that hell is actually a perfect, endless energy source. And so he and his scientists make an AI and start worshipping demons so that they can extract unlimited energy. And it's your job as the doomslayer to keep hell from breaking loose on Earth. But, you know, in that retelling, it's like this, this AI-driven tech bro future is hell.

So, you know, we're very much still today reshaping hell to speak to like our concerns in the moment. And I think people always find it compelling. Not everyone always takes it literally, but that probably was true back then, too. But there's a lot of power in how we, how we, you know, the stories we tell shape our relationship with others today. I think that you're bang on there. I think that there is always going to be this human desire to discuss the way that our world works and possibly hope to an extent that there is a hell. because in a world that is unjust, in a world that does privilege certain people over others, you kind of want there to be some way of getting justice.

You know, you want someone to just sort of notice that the wealthy seem to be able to run roughshod and nothing really happens. So I think that's what is so compelling about visions of hell is that, you know, we still see ourselves in them as much as medieval people did. Exactly. Yeah. Injustice has always been around the problem of theodicy, you know, how could a good God allow evil to flourish? These are perennial questions. And hell is sort of the perfect laboratory to experiment with answers to those ideas that are somehow logically and emotionally compelling, even if it's, you know, beyond our grasp. Well, speaking of things that are logically and emotionally compelling, everyone, go re-translating hell, I'm telling you. I can't get enough at this book. Stephen, thank you so, so much for coming to geek out with me today. I actually think it is really cool to read sermons on a Saturday night, and no one gets to tell me different.

Thanks so much for having me. This has been a real treat. Thanks so much to Stephen once again for joining me. And thank you for listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit. If you want more medieval fire and brimstone, and who could blame you, then you haven't got long to wait. Keep an eye on Matt's upcoming episodes because he is going to be talking about what Stephen and I hinted at a bit in this episode, Dante's Divine Comedy. So make sure that you go and join him in his dungeon soon as he embarks on the fiery journey to eternal damnation and explores the most famous depiction of hell in existence. Remember, you can enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries, including my recent documentary with Matt on medieval summer,

as well as ad-free podcasts by signing up at historyhit.com forward slash subscription. You can follow Gone Medieval on Spotify, where you can leave us comments and suggestions or wherever you get your podcast. And tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. Until next time.