The Road to Hel - A Study of the Conception of the Dead in Old Norse Literature
by Hilda Roderick Ellis, M.A., Ph.D.
1968

Hilda Roderick Ellis Davidson was born at Bebington, Cheshire, in 1914. She was educated at Park High School for Girls, Birkenhead, and Newnham College, Cambridge, where she took Firsts in English and Archaeology. She received her Ph.D in 1940 after three years of research under Professor and Mrs. Chadwick into the pagan beliefs of Scandinavia. She was an assistant lecturer in English at the Royal Holloway College from 1939 to 1944, after which she worked as a part-time lecturer in English at Birkbeck College. Since 1955, she has been engaged in writing and research. She is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and a member of the Council of the Folklore Society. Married with two children, she lives just outside Cambridge."

She is a lecturer and also holds a Calouste Gulbenkian Research Fellowship at the Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, and is working on eastern influences on the pre-Christian religion in Northern Europe.

[From "Gods and Myths of the Viking Age", 1980.]