Yáma

Yáma, the lord of the dead, appears indirectly in the poem’s battle narrative as the power associated with death and the dead. Rather than entering the action himself, he is evoked through the image of Yáma’s hall, which gives grief for a fallen chief and a request for the warriors’ return a shared language of loss and hoped-for reversal.

Identity and Narrative Presence

The available passages identify Yáma through a conventional afterlife image: the dead have gone to his hall. They do not show him speaking, judging the dead, or intervening in events. His role in these passages is therefore referential rather than dramatic; his name gives shape to the boundary the living mourn and seek to overcome.

The Hall of the Dead in Battle

After a chief falls, the ruler of Lanká laments that the renowned warrior has left him and his companions, asking why he has fled to “Yáma's hall.” The question turns a battlefield death into a personal abandonment: the fallen fighter is gone from the company, and the survivors’ grief is voiced as an address to the absent dead.

A Plea for the Fallen to Return

Later, a speaker asks that his friends be restored to life and strength and brought back from “Yáma's hall.” Death is presented as a departure from the living community, while the appeal imagines that departure being reversed. These references make Yáma’s hall a pointed contrast to the battle’s demand for renewed strength: the dead have passed beyond the warriors’ reach, yet the survivors still ask for their return.