At midwinter, it is often said, the dead draw near. Is that true for the age of the Vikings and the Germanic peoples? The sources do not say so in one sentence but in fragments: a remembrance goblet in Snorri, a "mothers' night" in Bede, winter feasts for the dísir, the dead at the fire in Eyrbyggja saga. Added to these are later household and folk customs that are easily taken for old. We sort them by age, author and weight, and what remains is a picture smaller than the legend, but sturdier.
"Yule is the feast of the ancestors" is one of those sentences often read and rarely seen documented. That does not mean it is wrong. It is a summary, and summaries fuse sources of different periods. The question therefore is: what stands in texts close to the feast, who wrote them down, and what is left when the later material is subtracted?
The result is a frame of a few firm posts. It is firm that Yule was a midwinter feast with drinking and sacrifice. It is firm that the departed were also remembered there, attested for tenth-century Norway. It is firm that further feasts for female beings (dísir, mothers) and for elves are attested in the winter half of the year. Everything beyond that, from the place set for the ancestors to the light in the window, is younger or interpretation. That is little, but it is enough for an honest article. A general introduction to the feast is given at Yule.
The word is old. The Gothic calendar (by the usual dating around 350, transmitted in the Codex Ambrosianus) names a month fruma jiuleis, "the month before Yule"; a month jiuleis can be inferred from it. Bede the Venerable writes around 725 in De temporum ratione that the Anglo-Saxons called December and January Giuli. In the North, jól is a feast and a period of time, and Jólnir ("Yule man") is one of Odin's names. The skald Eyvindr skáldaspillir also calls the gods jólnar in one stanza, which shows that the word was tied to the gods in tenth-century poetry. Where the word comes from is unclear: Jacob Grimm's link to "wheel" is considered untenable, and a more recent proposal thinks of a relationship with Latin iocus in the sense of "festive period."
When exactly Yule fell is likewise disputed. Hákonar saga góða speaks of a night, hǫkunótt, equated with Midwinter Night, and of a feast lasting three days. The Swedish historian of religion Andreas Nordberg has proposed that Nordic Yule lay at the full moon of the first lunar month after the winter solstice, that is, between about 5 January and 2 February in our calendar; the Midwinter Nights would then have been around 19 to 21 January. That is a proposal, not a consensus. All that is secure is that the date followed the lunar year and that the Church later pulled it onto Christmas.
The most important passage stands in Snorri's Hákonar saga góða, part of the Heimskringla (c. 1230). Hákon the Good ruled Norway around the middle of the tenth century and had, according to the saga, been baptised in Anglo-Saxon England. In Laing's numbering, chapter 15 describes how he made a law that the feast should begin at the same time as the Christians held it, and that every household must brew malt into ale and keep the feast as long as the ale lasted. Chapter 16 describes the sacrificial feasts as they had been held before:
"First Odin's goblet was emptied for victory and power to the king. [...] Then Niord's and Freyja's goblets for peace and a good season. [...] It was the custom of many to empty the brage-goblet. The guests emptied a goblet to the memory of departed friends, called the remembrance goblet."Snorri Sturluson, Hákonar saga góða, chapter 16 (Laing's numbering), excerpts, tr. Samuel Laing (1844, public domain)
The saga describes the setting in more detail: the fire burned in the middle of the floor of the temple, kettles hung over it, and the blood of the sacrificial animals was sprinkled with sprinkling-twigs on altars and walls, inside and out. The picture is that of a communal meal around an open fire.
The scene is not set explicitly at Yule but is a general description of the sacrificial feast, which Snorri embeds against the background of Hákon's Yule law. It is the oldest and clearest source for the minni, the cup to the dead. As a witness, though, Snorri is a man of the thirteenth century who wrote two centuries after Hákon and does not name his sources (skaldic stanzas, oral tradition). The remembrance goblet is thus attested in the Heimskringla, not in a contemporary source. Incidentally, it is notable that the Laing version names Njord and Freyja; the Old Norse text, in the usual editions, reads Njord and Freyr, just as the formula til árs ok friðar ("for a good year and peace") is linked with both gods.
The formula lives on. In the older Gulathing law, the Norwegian church law, people are required to brew ale and hallow it for "Christ and Saint Mary," "for prosperity and peace" (til árs ok friðar). The Church thus took over the form and exchanged the addressees. More on drinking in this period: Viking beer and Mead.
The only source on the Anglo-Saxon midwinter night is at the same time the most famous. Bede writes in De temporum ratione (chapter 15) that the night of 25 December, "which we hold so sacred," was called by the heathens with the word Modranecht, "that is, mothers' night," because, as Bede puts it, "we suspect," ceremonies were performed in it. He says no more. What the "mothers" were and what happened, we do not know.
Scholarship has tried to fill the gap. One line connects the mothers with the matrons, those mother goddesses who in Roman times received altars and votive stones along the Rhine, mostly in groups of three; we know them from inscriptions, not from texts. Rudolf Simek sees in this a link between West Germanic matron cult and later Scandinavian rites such as the dísablót. Gabriel Turville-Petre suspected a connection between Modranecht and the dísablót; Philip A. Shaw argues that the partial confirmation by matron inscriptions is a reason not to dismiss Bede's statement too quickly. That sacrifices took place that night is conjecture. The translation too is disputed: the Latin word is plural, so "mothers' night" is better than "mother's night." More on the background: Matrons, Dísir and Rauhnächte and Modranecht.
Yule did not stand alone. The Norse sources know further feasts of the winter half of the year that lead into the realm of the dead. The vetrnætr, the Winter Nights, lay in mid to late October and opened the winter half. Gísla saga knows a vetrnáttablót for Freyr with ball games and decorated halls, Eyrbyggja saga a feast on Snæfellsnes, Óláfs saga helga a blót with toasts and animal sacrifice. The three-day length and the lunar tie are assumptions of scholarship. In the legislation of the conversion period the feast turns into All Hallows: Gulathing law requires ale to be brewed at All Hallows. A link to ancestors is not stated there.
The dísablót was for the dísir, female beings connected with fate and probably also with fertility. It is mentioned in Hervarar saga, Víga-Glúms saga, Egils saga and in Snorri's Ynglinga saga (where King Adils dies at a dísablót); at Uppsala it coincided with the Disting, a thing and fair that survives as an annual fair to this day. Who performed the sacrifice is contradictory in the sources: Hervarar saga points to women, Ynglinga saga names the king as high priest. Whether the dísir were ancestresses is hypothesis. More: Dísir and Þorrablót.
The álfablót, the elf sacrifice, is known from a single passage, but a vivid one. The Christian skald Sigvatr Þórðarson travelled around 1019 as envoy of King Olaf of Norway to the Swedish king and describes in his Austrfararvísur how at the farm Hof in Västergötland he is turned away: they are heathens, they fear Odin's wrath and are just celebrating the elf sacrifice. At two further farms the same thing happens; three men of the same name (Ölvir) send him off. According to scholarship the feast was a domestic late-autumn celebration, led above all by the woman of the house; the rites were secret. Elves stood for collective powers that may have been linked to ancestors and fertility. That is an interpretation resting on thin sources. For elves in general: Elves.
That the departed return in winter is told by the sagas in their own way. In Eyrbyggja saga, written down probably in the middle or second half of the thirteenth century, strange things happen at the farm Fróðá after Thorgunna's death: a shepherd walks, Thorir Wooden-leg dies after meeting him, further people die, and at Yule Thorir and other dead come into the hall, shake wet clothes over the guests and kill servants. The dead warm themselves at the fire as they do so. They can be banished only by a court and Christian rites. In Grettis saga the dead shepherd Glam walks at Yule and is beheaded by Grettir.
These stories are horror literature of a Christian century, but they build on a notion that may be pre-Christian: at Yule the borders are thin, and the dead who have not parted well come back. Parallel to it stands the idea of the procession of the dead, the "Wild Hunt," for which nineteenth-century Norway collected names such as Oskoreia or Juleskreia. In the tales the host steals Christmas food and ale. In the Flateyjarbók (Haralds þáttr hárfagra) Odin himself steals Yule food. The Wild Hunt is a subject of its own: Wild Hunt; for revenants see Draugr.
What matters is the attitude: these dead are not ancestors to be kindly honoured. They are danger and duty at once. That fits what we saw in Honouring the dead among the Germanic peoples: whoever does not part well from the dead gets them back.
A further attestation leads to the heart of the question whether ancestors bestow blessing. According to the Ynglinga saga, the god Njord ruled over the Swedes in times of peace and plenty, "so that the Swedes believed Njord ruled over the growth of seasons." His son Freyr fell ill, and his men let few approach him. They raised a great mound with a door with three holes in it, bore him in secretly, told the Swedes he was alive, and kept watch for three years. The taxes they put into the mound, through the holes gold, silver and copper. After that "peace and good seasons continued."
This is royal myth, not funeral cult. But it shows something scholars like to stress: the dead king in the mound goes on working in the story and secures the harvest. A notion that the departed bring prosperity from the mound evidently stands ready behind this tale. Whether it was celebrated at Yule, Snorri does not say. In the Ynglinga saga (chapter 8) Odin also decrees that at the beginning of winter a blood sacrifice is due for a good year, and in the middle of winter one for a good crop.
In the house, people saw the ancestors at the high seat. The öndvegissúlur, the "high-seat pillars," stood on both sides of the head of the household's seat. According to Landnámabók and several sagas, emigrants took them from Norway, threw them overboard off the coast of Iceland and founded their farm where they drifted ashore; by tradition the settler Ingólfr Arnarson founded the first farm on the site of today's Reykjavík this way. According to Eyrbyggja saga (chapter 4), the pillars in the temple of Þórólfr Mostrarskegg held reginnaglar, "god-nails," and one pillar was carved with an image of Thor. What such pillars looked like is not known; archaeological finds are lacking.
That the pillars bore ancestor images, as is sometimes claimed, is not attested. What is attested is that they were tied to gods (Thor) and to the fate of the kindred. The idea that at Yule the ancestors sat at the high seat is a continuation that the sagas do not expressly bear out. What belongs to the house is also treated in The Viking longhouse and Kin and family.
Then come the customs everyone knows or thinks they know. At Yule one covers open pots so that no spirit settles in. One puts milk or cream in the corner so that those passing by can refresh themselves. One throws fat and crumbs into the hearth fire. One sees representatives of the ancestors in house snake, house otter, cricket and toad, and in the kobold a house spirit who finishes the work at night. All this is described by the folklore scholarship of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from many regions, and it is to a large extent younger than the Viking Age, even if single features may be older.
An example of the difficulty of dating is the snake. In the tradition of the Lombards of Benevento, a golden viper and a walnut tree were venerated in the seventh century; Bishop Barbatus had the tree cut down and the viper melted into a chalice. But the source is a ninth-century vita, about two centuries after the events of 663, and the cult concerns southern Italy, not the North. That snakes were venerated as ancestor spirits of the house is an interpretation from folklore studies; the viper of Benevento does not prove it. For house and land spirits see Landvættir and Nisse and tomte; for the idea of a personal guardian spirit, Fylgja and hamingja.
Hákon's Yule law shows the mechanism. The feast was moved in time to Christmas and the beer made compulsory; only the addressee changed. Gulathing law requires ale to be brewed at Christmas and at All Hallows and hallows it "for Christ and Saint Mary, for prosperity and peace." This very formula shows how the old lived on: not forbidden, but written over.
Remembrance of the dead was anchored elsewhere in the Christian year, in All Souls and All Saints. A late example, however, shows how alive the link between winter light and the dead can be. In Finland, candles are lit on graves on Christmas Eve, thousands in every larger cemetery, especially on war graves. The tradition is sometimes connected with older ancestor rites of the harvest feast kekri that are said to have shifted to Christmas. But the first documented candle burned only in 1921 in the old cemetery of Helsinki, and the practice spread after the wars; it is traced to the influence of the Moravian Church, probably but not certainly. This very example shows how quickly an "ancient" custom can be young. More on the feast in the church year: Germanic feasts.
In the German-speaking area, numerous ideas cling to the nights between Christmas and Epiphany that are called "Rauhnächte": processions of ghosts, prohibitions such as doing laundry, smoking house and stable. That they are the continuation of Mothers' Night and of the Yule feast is often asserted. They are documented in folklore from the early modern period and the late Middle Ages. The bridge to Bede and to the North is plausible in thought and cannot be shown. We have treated the question at length in Rauhnächte and Modranecht.
What matters for this subject is the distinction. In their transmitted form the Rauhnächte are rather a complex of danger and cleansing than a feast of the ancestors. What the sources show for the midwinter feast is first of all drinking, sacrifice, banquet, and only in second place the dead.
One need not stage a great ritual to share in the old thought. One more place set on a feast day, a quiet toast to someone missed, or simply a light that burns for the departed: these are gestures of the present that can appeal to the remembrance goblet of the Hákonar saga without claiming a transmitted rite. The candle in the window, the cup in the circle, a name spoken aloud are so plain that they fit every family, whatever the belief. Whoever wants to place the whole cycle of feasts will find it in the Blót calendar and in Heathens today: blót and sumbel.
A light in the dark also has a second, practical side: at midwinter it gets dark early, and the winter solstice is the shortest day of the year (Solstice). Lights belong to midwinter in almost all cultures, and no derivation from the ancestors is needed.
The sources for Yule are sparse, late and mediated by Christians. The word Yule is attested early, the feast in Bede, in skalds and in Snorri's royal sagas. The remembrance goblet for the departed is a single but clear attestation. The ancestor feasts of the winter half of the year (Winter Nights, dísablót, álfablót) belong to the context, but their relation to the dead is interpretation. And the large remainder, from the place setting to the house snake, is later tradition that reaches the Viking Age at best indirectly.
That is less than some books promise, and more than nothing. It is enough to say: at Yule people drank, sacrificed and, in doing so, also remembered the dead. Everything further should stay marked as a possibility.
Was Yule an ancestor feast? Only in part attested. Hákonar saga góða names the remembrance goblet for departed friends at the sacrificial feast; Yule as a pure ancestor feast is a modern summary. Further feasts of the winter half of the year (Winter Nights, dísablót, álfablót) belong to the surroundings.
What is the minni? The minni (Old Norse minni, "memory") is the draught in memory of a departed person. In Hákonar saga góða the cup is called the "remembrance goblet" and is drunk after the cups for Odin, Njord and Freyr.
What was Modranecht? Modranecht, "mothers' night," is the name of the night of 25 December among the Anglo-Saxons according to Bede (c. 725). Bede only suspects that ceremonies took place. Whether the "mothers" were ancestresses, dísir or matrons is open.
When did Yule fall? Hákon's Yule law set the date on Christmas. Before that Yule lay probably by the moon; Nordberg proposes the full moon of the lunar month after the winter solstice, that is, between 5 January and 2 February. That is a proposal, not a consensus.
Did the dead come into the house at Yule? In the sagas yes, but as a threat: in Eyrbyggja saga the dead warm themselves at the fire, in Grettis saga Glam walks. A friendly ancestor meal is not described there; it is a later idea.
Is the light for the ancestors an old ritual? No, it is a more recent gesture. One example is the Finnish custom of placing candles on graves on Christmas Eve, whose first documented candle burned in 1921 in Helsinki. It can take up old thoughts without claiming an old rite.
Für Mut. Für Erinnerung. Für Legenden, die weiterleben.
How the Germanic peoples honoured their dead · The Rauhnächte & Mother's Night · The Wild Hunt · The old year's cycle up close · Þorrablót – the winter feast.
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