Well that’s a great piece of info as the majority of us met Hel through Holywood. Somehow the ancient layers of the afterworld were not so scary as they are pictured today by Christianity (no matter which church). All of them regarded death as a natural cycle and though losing someone dear was never a simple thing, regarding the end of this cycle as a natural and orderly thing surely made their life easier.
As I think that religions usually serve one main goal, that of controlling masses, it surely was easier to regard death this way in order to justify the sacrificies being requested in times of war and usually , it made the action of “going to war” easier to accept from the perspective of the soldier.