c.1450–1516 oil-on-wood painting of the harrowing of hell by an artist in the school of Hieronymus Bosch. Image of people being tortured by demons and being fed into the gigantic mouth of Satan in the center of the frame. At center left is Christ breaking down the gate to hell and admitting light.
11 November 2022
As a general rule, words that are central to a particular culture date to an early period. Therefore, it is no surprise that hell traces back to Old English, pretty much unchanged in form and meaning. And given that much of the extant Old English corpus is religious in nature and was copied and preserved by Christian monks and nuns, it is no surprise that the word appears some nine hundred times in that corpus. While most of those appearances are in the context of a Christian hell or the Sheol of the Hebrew Bible, some are in reference to pagan abodes of the dead. And indeed hell comes from a common Germanic root relating to the underworld. For example, the Old Icelandic Hel is the name of the goddess who rules over the dead as well as her abode
We see hell in Ælfric of Eynsham’s tenth century translation of Genesis 37:35. The verse is about Jacob learning that his favorite son Joseph has been killed:
Soðlice hys bearn hi gesamnodon to þam þæt hi heora fæder gefrefrodon: he nolde nane frefrunge underfon, ac cwæð wepende: ic fare to minum suna to helle
(Now, his children gathered there to console their father; he would not accept the consolation and said weeping: “I go with my son into hell.”)
Of course, Joseph had not been killed, but rather had been sold into slavery by his jealous brothers.
Hell starts breaking loose by the late sixteenth century. The following is a passage from the anonymous play Misogonus, dating to around 1570:
Stay a while Eupelas I knowe our laboure we shall lose but yet He tell the vnthrift of his detestable dealinge Calsta this honest company or is this an honest sporte to be revelinge and bousinge after such a lewde fashion I thinke hell breake louse when thou gatst ye this porte foure such thou coudst scase fynde in a whole nashion
And by 1600 Shakespeare is telling people to go to hell. From the Merchant of Venice:
One half of me is yours, the other halfe yours,
Mine owne, I would say; but if mine, then yours,
And so all yours; o, these naughty times
Puts barres betweene the owners and their rights;
And so, though yours, not yours, (proue it so)
Let fortune goe to hell for it, not I.
But go to the devil is much older. Geoffrey Chaucer uses that phrase some two hundred years earlier. From The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, in a passage about what makes a woman attractive to a man:
Thou seyst som folk desiren us for richesse,
Somme for oure shap, and somme for oure fairnesse,
And som for she kan outher synge or daunce,
And som for gentillesse and daliaunce;
Som for hir handes and hir armes smale;
Thus goth al to the devel, by thy tale.(You say some folk desire us for riches,
Some for our shape, and some for our beauty,
And some because she can either sing or dance,
And some for nobility and flirtatiousness;
Some for their hands and their slender arms;
Thus goes all to the devil, by your telling.)
And a bit later, the Wife complains that age has robbed her of her beauty and vigor:
But age, allas, that al wole envenyme,
Hath me biraft my beautee and my pith.
Lat go. Farewel! The devel go therwith!(But age, alas, that will poison all,
Has robbed me of beauty and vigor.
Let it go. Farewell! Go to the devil with it!
The use of hell as an intensifier and interjection, that is as profanity, appears at about the same time as Shakespeare’s go to hell. From a 1605 satirical play Eastward Hoe by George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston, a scene where a shipwrecked man washes ashore at a place called Cuckold’s Haven:
Secu[ritie]. Heauen, I beseech thee, how haue I offended thee! where am I cast a shore nowe, that I may goe a righter way home by land? Let me see. O I am scarce able to looke about me! where is there any Sea-marke that I am acquainted withall?
Slit[gut]. Looke vp Father, are you acquainted with this Marke?
Secu. What! landed at Cuckolds hauen? Hell and damnation. I will runne backe and drowne my selfe.
Bloody hell isn’t recorded until the nineteenth century, although oral use is undoubtedly older. The following account of a trial for mutiny onboard a ship was printed in the New Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette on 7 January 1857. The incident had occurred on 19 May 1856:
On the 19th of May, about 7 o’clock A. M., Wales being at the wheel, Capt. Lunt told him to keep the ship before the wind. Wales replied, “Why the bloody hell don’t you give me a course?”—Upon this, Capt. Lunt took him by the collar, when Wales seized the captain by the throat, tore his shirt from him, and was in the act of stabbing him with a sheath knife, when his arm was arrested by the mate.
There is a published use of hell as intensifier between these two dates. From the Daily Cleveland Herald of 1 September 1856 in an account of the last words of Philander Brace from the gallows as he awaited his hanging for murder:
Come, dry up! What the bloody hell is the use of keeping me here just waiting on you? I want to go through with it.
The fact that these early uses of bloody hell, a characteristically British phrase, appear in American newspapers may be due to the fact that the phrase wasn’t considered so offensive on the left side of the pond and was therefore considered fit to print.
And indeed, both bloody hell and hell are recorded in the 1888 West Somerset Word-Book:
Lor! lawk! lawk-a-massy! massy soce! massy ’pon us! strike me! s’elp me! are, of course, mere conjunctives, and with some individuals “Hell! bloody hell!” serve to eke out most sentences.
Sources:
“California News.” Daily Cleveland Herald (Ohio), 1 September 1856, 2. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century US Newspapers.
Chapman, George, Ben Jonson, and John Marston. Eastward Hoe. London: William Aspley, 1605, 4.1, sig. F2v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale. The Canterbury Tales. lines 257–62. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.
Crawford, S.J. The Old English Version of the Heptateuch (1922). Early English Text Society O.S. 160. London: Oxford UP, 2004, Genesis 37:35, 174.
Dictionary of Old English: A to I. University of Toronto, 2018, s.v. hell, helle, n.
Elworthy, Thomas. The West Somerset Word-Book. English Dialect Society. London: Trübner, 1888, s.v. oaths, imprecations, and exclamations, 530. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Misogonus (c.1570). 2.5. In Richard Warwick Bond. Early Plays from the Italian. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911, 215. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2008, s.v. hell, n. and int., Hel, n.; June 2017, s.v. devil, n.
Shakespeare, William. The Most Excellent Historie of the Merchant of Venice. London, James Roberts for Thomas Heyes, 1600, sig. E3v. Folger Shakespeare Library.
“U.S. District Court.” New Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette, 7 January 1857, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Zoëga. Geir T. A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic. Toronto: U of Toronto Press, 2004, s.v. hel, n.
Image credit: Unknown artist, c.1450–1516. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.