A viking christmas
As my current series of historical novels, The Whale Road Chronicles, is set in the Viking Age, I thought that as my part in this year's Spectacular Historical Writers Forum December Blog Hop should look at what the norse got up to at this time of year.
Yule, or Jól to give it the Scandinavian spelling, was a mid-winter festival celebrated across northern Europe. The fact that variations of a word for it exists in Old English (where it was known as ġéol), Old Norse, Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian Danish, and Swedish shows how widespread it was. A variation of the word appears in the (now extinct) Gothic language in a 6th Century text, which shows how old it is.
Like a lot of heathen traditions, what was actually involved in Yule is largely lost to time but can we trace any of our modern traditions back to the vikings?
Yule is mentioned in many sagas but usually as a marker for the time of year, rather than telling us what went on. A lot of vikings and kings go on expeditions “after Yule”. What can be discerned from the medieval sagas is that Yule involved several consecutive days of feasting (perhaps 13 or more) and gifts were given out. Also spooky things seem to happen around that time.
Gift giving is well attested in the sagas, and also in Medieval English Literature, particularly in the poem known as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which was written in a part of England that was under heavy Norse influence. I’ve covered the potential identity of Sir Bertilak de Haut Desert in a previous post but I’ll touch on an older candidate for that role later here. The Saga of Olaf Haraldsson (in Heimskringla) has a whole section on "King Olaf's presents at Yule". The text mentions that at Yule in 1028, the King " had, according to his custom, collected there with great care the valuable presents he was to make" which included very valuable gold-mounted swords he would present to his most loyal retainers, as ring giver kings had done since time immemorial. Some rulers, however, may not have been so generous. Svein Knutsson, a Danish King, used the tradition to increase the oppression of his Norwegian subjects, demanding they pay him substantial Yule gifts every year:
“At Yule each farmer was to give the king a measure
of malt for each hearth, a ham from a three-year-old ox—
this was called ‘a bit of the meadow’90—and a measure of
butter; and each housewife should supply a ‘lady’s tow’91—
that was as much clean flax as could be clasped between
thumb and middle finger.”
-from Ágrip af Nóregskonungasögum
Eventually, in 1090, King Magnus Barefoot "did away with Yule-gifts" and so won great popularity.
Heavy drinking and overeating appear to be an important part of the Yule feast, two activities still carried on at Christmas today. For example there is this description in Heimskringla:
“There was a great Yule feast and ale-drinking, to which each brought his own liquor; for there were many peasants in the village, who all drank in company together at Yule. There was another village not far distant, where Thorar's brother-in-law dwelt, who was a rich and powerful man, and had a grown-up son. The brothers-in-law intended to pass the Yule in drinking feasts, half of it at the house of the one and half with the other; and the feast began at Thorar's house. The brothers-in-law drank together, and Thorod and the sons of the peasants by themselves; and it was a drinking match”
Another common event at Norse and Old English feasts was the swearing of oaths in front of the assembled feasters. These were promises, sometimes called boasts, of what individuals would achieve in the year ahead. Given their public nature, these were more than empty aspirations and failure to fulfil them would result in loss of honour. This is where our tradition of making New Year’s Resolutions came from. So this year when you fail to lose a few pounds in January think how more onerous that would have been for your Viking ancestors.
Yule was also a time when strange things happened. For example Heimskringla relates how King Halfdan the Black of Norway, while “at a Yule-feast in Hadeland”, “a wonderful thing happened”. When the guests assembled to sit down at the table, “all the meat and all the ale disappeared from the table” due to some weird magic worked by a Finnish man.
In Grettir’s Saga, the thrall Glamr famously is turned into an undead monster after eating meat on Yule eve. In Icelandic tales ghosts of the ancestors returned to their former homesteads to warm themselves at the hearth and it was common to leave baked loaves and a drink for them there, another tradition we still do today, though the cookies are now for a different visitor.
The Icelandic medieval manuscript known as Flateyjarbók mentions that a certain god was associated with Yule, Odin.
“Here it is fitting to elucidate a problem posed by Christian men as to what heathen men knew about Yule, for our Yule has its origin in the birth of Our Lord. Heathen men
had a feast, held in honour of Ódinn, and Ódinn is called by many names: he is called Vidrir and he is called Hár and Firidi and Jólnir; and it is after Jólnir that Yule [Jól] is named.”
Odin was indeed known by many names, and another one was Jölföðr, which literally means “Yule Father”, or Father Yule. Just as Yule merged into Christmas, Father Yule came with it, giving us the origin of the most mercurial of figures, the Jolly Old Elf himself, Father Christmas.
For more spectacular christmas blogging, check out the next instalment on the hop from the brilliant Vanessa Couchman or check out some of the the others in the tour, outlined below.
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