Helvegen

An illustration that was inspired by the song "Helvegen" by the band Wardruna and my travel to north norway. As a big fan of surrealism, I tried to create a landscape that has real world feeling to it but sprinkle little subtle details into it that give it a surreal dreamlike expression. The most obvious ones are probably the spiky ice pillars, that have glowing runes on their lower end, which if translated, are actual lyrics of the song in old norse, followed by the frost hands emerging from the sea. My favorite is probably the face that is shaped by the sail of the boat, which can be interpreted in a variety of ways, for example being the face of a dead person making their way through the Helvegen, or a personification of the goddess Hel, the ruler of Helheim.