How did we get from a Christian holy day marking the birth of Christ
to a celebration involving evergreen trees, feasting, and drinking, and reindeer?
Welcome to the Endless Knot.
Today, we'll look at the word yule.
(light upbeat music)
Before it was co-opted to refer to Christmas,
Germanic word yule meant a month-long holiday
coinciding with the winter solstice,
and specifically, a pagan midwinter fertility festival.
The word yule comes from the Old English geol,
and is related to other Germanic words
like the Old Norse jol.
We don't know for sure where this Germanic root comes from,
but it might come from an Indo-European word, yek,
which means to speak,
and also gives us words, such as joke, juggle, and jewel
probably through association with festivity.
Or it could come from an Indo-European word kwel,
which means to turn or move around,
and also gives us words such as wheel and cycle,
probably referring to the turn of the year that happens at yule.
From Old Norse jol, also possibly comes jolly
through old French joli, meaning pretty or cute,
unless that comes from Latin gaudere, to rejoice.
Or maybe both sources are at play here.
What is certain though is that Clement Clarke Moore
famously refers to Santa Claus as a jolly old elf
in the poem commonly known as 'Twas the Night Before Christmas.
The combination of the words jolly and elf, also from a Germanic root,
starts us down the road to the Germanic origins
of so many modern English and North American Christmas traditions,
all because the early church decided to mash up Christ's birthday
with midwinter festivals.
If you hear the word yule today, it might be in the phrase yule log,
a particularly large log traditionally saved for burning at Christmas,
or a kind of log-shaped Christmas cake.
It's been suggested that the traditional burning of the yule log has its roots
in early Germanic pagan ritual.
Trees seem to have been a big deal in early Germanic belief.
For instance, when describing the Germanic people,
the Roman historian, Tacitus, writes about the importance
of particular types of wood and sacred groves as places of worship
And the Norse cosmology is based around the image
of the World Tree, Yggdrasil.
This emphasis on trees, also important to early Celts,
seems to have survived in England
from the time of the earliest Germanic peoples, who settled there.
We see this also in the tradition of Christmas decorations
with evergreens such as Christmas wreaths, mistletoe, and holly,
all symbolically appropriate for a midwinter fertility festival,
since evergreens stay green through the winter months.
Christmas trees too seemed to come from Germanic pagan roots,
but aren't from that continuous English tradition.
The Christmas tree was popularized much later
in the Victorian period by Prince Albert, the German-born husband of Queen Victoria,
after having been imported a little earlier
by other German-born members of the British royal family.
And then there's the traditional Christmas ham,
a custom that goes back to the Germanic yule boar.
The boar was associated with the Norse fertility god, Freyr,
and it was customary to sacrifice a boar
as part of the pagan Yule celebrations to ensure fertility in the coming year.
This is reflected in the song "The Boar's Head Carol."
Slaughtering most of your livestock
before winter, of course, makes good sense,
since then you don't have to feed them all when food is scarce,
and a new set of animals will be born in the spring.
No wonder people often have a large feast at that time of year,
like our over-the-top Christmas dinners.
So when you have to loosen your belt two notches over the holidays,
you can blame those old Germanic pagans.
Wassailing, now most familiar in the Christmas carol,
"Here We Come A-wassailing," also seems to have roots
in an Anglo-Saxon fertility tradition.
Wassail, the drink, is similar to mulled ale or apple cider.
And wassailing, which is now commonly used
to mean the practice of Christmas carol singing
from door to door, also refers to the ritual of singing in apple orchards
to scare away evil spirits and ensure a good apple harvest the next year.
The toast itself, wassail, is from the Anglo-Saxon Wæs þu hæl,
meaning be thou hale, or in other words, be healthy.
But getting back to the word yule,
Nordic countries have a tradition of the yule goat,
called a julbok in Scandinavian countries,
or joulupukki in Finland,
which might involve constructing a large straw goat or dressing up
in a goat costume to go wassailing or give out gifts.
Though the modern version of Santa Claus has largely replaced the goat man,
Finns still use the term you joulupukki to refer to the guy in the red suit.
The yule goat may have its origins
in the two goats that were said to pull the chariot of Thor,
the north Thunder God.
And this may also have inspired the reindeer who pull Santa's sleigh.
And remember, two of the reindeer are named Donner and Blitzen,
which mean thunder and lightning.
Incidentally, the term julbok or joulupukki
is etymologically the same as yule buck, and buck comes from an old Germanic word
for a male deer or goat.
Bock is a type of lightly hopped lager beer
that is commonly associated
with festive occasions, particularly Christmas
It's called Bock, because originally,
it comes from a German town called Einbeck,
which, when pronounced with a Bavarian accent,
sounds like ein bock, meaning a goat.
And so, beer labels on bottles of Bock often feature a picture of a goat,
particularly appropriate given the Christmas association.
But getting back to Santa's reindeer and Norse mythology,
the chief god, Odin,
rode his eight-legged horse, called Sleipnir,
in the Scandinavian version of The Wild Hunt,
a widespread European myth
involving ghostly huntsmen on horseback
riding wildly through the sky.
And this is an element of the Germanic pagan Yule festival,
thus Odin's eight-legged horse may have led to Santa's eight reindeer.
And Odin, who is sometimes known by the name Jolnir,or Yule figure,
and often depicted as an old man with a white beard and hat and cloak
may have influenced our modern image of Father Christmas, or Santa Claus,
in combination with the old English tradition
of Old Father Time, as well as the Mediterranean gift-giving Saint Nicholas.
Yeah, it's all a little complicated.
Okay, back to Odin and The Wild Hunt.
In Germanic pagan tradition, Yule is a time of supernatural occurrences
and is connected with the cult of the dead and ancestor worship.
Odin is, appropriately enough, a god of the dead.
And this association with Yule, may to some extent carry over
to Christmas in the tradition of the Christmas ghost story.
Think Charles Dickens as a Christmas carol with its ghosts
of Marley and of Christmas past, present, and yet to come
Dickens is almost single-handedly responsible
for the revival of Christmas as a major public holiday.
Well, along with the popularizer of the Christmas tree,
fellow Victorian Prince Albert.
Remember him?
Before the Victorian period, Christmas was in decline
and not particularly popular.
In fact, in what was the real war on Christmas,
Oliver Cromwell and his party-pooper Puritan pals,
tried to stamp out Christmas,
as did many of the early Puritan colonies in North America,
passing laws forbidding its celebration and requiring shops to stay open,
since they saw all that feasting and drinking and celebrating
as rather too pagan.
Well, as you can see, they weren't wrong.
But then, where did Dickens's version of snowy festive Christmases come from?
Well, oddly enough, we have a volcano to thank for that.
In 1815, Mount Tambora in Indonesia had an enormous volcanic eruption,
which drastically affected world climate,
making the following years remarkably cooler than usual,
with the so-called year without a summer in 1816
and at least eight snowy winters in a row in England,
not a common occurrence.
As a result, winters for young Charles, who was born in 1812,
involved the iconic white Christmases
that set the tone for his Christmas writings,
like a Christmas cow.
Another literary outcome of the Mount Tambora eruption,
by the way, was the cool and rainy summer
in Switzerland in 1816,
where Percy and Mary Shelley, Lord Byron,
and his personal physician, John Polidori, were holidaying.
The miserable weather meant they stayed indoors a lot,
and this led to them having a ghost story writing contest,
which ultimately led to Mary's famous novel, Frankenstein.
And what could be more Christmas-y than reanimated corpses, right?
Well, oddly enough, maybe according to Germanic mythology.
In Old Norse stories such as Gretta saga,
it is said that the activity of draugr increases around Yule.
The draugr were the walking dead, a bit like ghosts, but more corporeal.
So maybe more like zombies.
They dwelt in their burial mounds
and sometimes came out to make trouble for the living,
attacking their homes and so forth, particularly at Yule.
In another Old Norse saga, King Hrólfs Saga,
one of King Hrólfs' warriors, named Bödvar Bjarki,
fights off some kind of winged monster,
which always attacks xthe King's Hall at Yule.
This battle, along with a troll fight
described in Gretta Saga, are often held up
as remarkably close parallels to the fight between Beowulf and Grendel
in the famous Anglo-Saxon poem.
Though Grendel's attacks aren't specifically at Yule,
as are the other monsters' attacks, Grendel does perhaps have a role to play
in one of our modern Christmas stories,
Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
like the Old Norse monsters, The Grinch comes to the settlement
at Christmas/Yule.
Like Grendel and the Old Norse monsters, he comes at night.
And the attacks of both the Grinch and Grendel are triggered
by the sound of people singing
and happily celebrating in their community,
while the Grinch/Grendel is left friendless,
out in the cold wilderness.
Even their names, Grinch and Grendel,
sound similar, so perhaps Dr. Seuss was inspired by the figure of Grendel
as well as by Dickens's Christmas-hating character, Scrooge
in creating his iconic Grinch.
So as we approach the season of Yule,
don't be a grinch, or Scrooge, or a Grendel, and join me in raising a cup of wassail
or a bottle of Bock to the fascinating origins of the coming holiday.
I'll be back soon with more
etymological explorations and cultural connections,
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