 Grimm says that Hel is an example of a "half-goddess;" "one who cannot be shown to be either wife or daughter of a god, and who stands in a dependent relation to higher divinities" and that "half-goddesses" stand higher than "half-gods" in Germanic mythology.Hilda Ellis Davidson (1948) states that Hel "as a goddess" in surviving sources seems to belong to a genre of literary personification, that the word "hel" is generally "used simply to signify death or the grave," and that the word often appears as the equivalent to the English 'death,' which Davidson states "naturally lends itself to personification by poets.