The Germanic year knew no spring – only summer and winter. And its feasts followed the rhythm of field and war. Snorri names three great blóts; to these come Yule, the Winter Nights and the Dísir sacrifices. An honest overview of the real Germanic festival calendar – and what in it is a modern invention.
Whoever wants to understand the Germanic feasts must first rethink the year itself. It did not follow the Roman calendar with its twelve months, but the visible course of sun, moon and field work. And out of this rhythm grew a festival cycle that echoes to this day in customs, weekday names and winter celebrations – often without our noticing.
The Germanic year knew no spring and no autumn as seasons of their own – only summer and winter. People counted in winters, not in years: a child was "so many winters old". The two half-years (Old Norse misseri) divided life into a bright time of work, travel and war, and a dark time of retreat, stores and feasts by the hearth fire.
Unlike Greeks and Romans, the Germani left no fixed calendar reports of their feasts. We piece the picture together from scattered sources: from Tacitus (around 98 AD), from the Anglo-Saxon monk Bede (8th century) with his month names, from the Royal Annals and penitentials of the Christianisation period, and from the far later Norse sources such as the Edda and Snorri's sagas (13th century). Each of these sources has its gaps and its colouring – an honest overview must say so openly.
The Germanic feast is called blót – literally "sacrifice", but in fact sacrifice and feast in one. There was no divine service in the modern sense, no sermon, no holy book. Religion was lived community: the common doing at the cult place, the ve or the sacred grove.
At the blót an animal was slaughtered, its blood (Old Norse hlaut) sprinkled with twigs onto altar, walls and participants. The meat was boiled in great cauldrons and eaten together. At the toasting of memory the full horns went round: the full to the gods for a good year, the minni to the departed ancestors in remembrance. Whoever celebrated thereby renewed the bonds to gods, dead and kin at once. Feast, sacrifice, meal and ancestral memory were a single act.
The clearest source on the Norse festival year is Snorri's Ynglinga saga. It names three fixed sacrificial times:
„One shall sacrifice at the beginning of winter for a good year, at midwinter for good growth, and a third time at the beginning of summer – the victory sacrifice.“— after Snorri, Ynglinga saga 8 (public domain)
These three axes – beginning of winter, midwinter, beginning of summer – form the framework of the handed-down festival year. Everything else is embellishment, regional variant or later knowledge. Important: Snorri wrote more than 200 years after the conversion of Iceland. He orders and systematises where the old reality was perhaps more colourful and less uniform.
A rare, almost cinematic insight is given by the Hákonar saga góða in Snorri's Heimskringla. King Hákon the Good had become a Christian but had to take part in the heathen blót of his farmers. Snorri describes the cauldrons over the fire, the sprinkling with blood, the consecrating of the horns – and the conflict when the king made the sign of the cross over the cup and a loyal man quickly reinterpreted it as Thor's hammer sign to keep the peace.
Fixed drinking rounds belonged to the sequence: the Óðins full for victory and royal power, the Njörðr- and Freyr full for ár ok friðr – "good year and peace". At great feasts the boastful vow (heitstrenging) was laid over the sacred boar (sonargöltr): a solemn oath on a deed for the coming year. Feast and honour, drink and obligation were inseparable.
Winter begins with the Winter Nights (Vetrnætr) in October – at once harvest thanksgiving and entry into the dark half-year. Into this time falls the Álfablót, a private farm sacrifice for the elves and ancestors. It was so much the affair of the individual family that a travelling skald, Sigvatr Þórðarson, was turned away door after door – everywhere the Álfablót was just being celebrated, and strangers remained excluded. A precious testimony of how deep the household cult was.
In parallel stands the Dísablót for the dísir – protective female ancestral and fate spirits. In Uppsala a great market and an assembly (the Dísaþing) were even connected with it. Women played a leading role in the ancestor and fate cult; the feast shows how much the Germani understood their dead as a continuing power of the kin.
The climax of the dark half-year is Yule at midwinter: the great feast of abundance, light and community, with mead, oaths and Odin's Wild Hunt in the night sky. From Yule countless Christmas customs have grown to this day – the Yule goat, the Yule log, the feast in the darkest time.
Important for understanding: Yule was originally no solstice feast on a fixed date. The Germanic year was lunisolar – bound to moon and sun – and scholarship (e.g. Andreas Nordberg) locates Yule at the first full moon after the winter solstice, not on 21 December. Only through Christianisation was Yule merged with the fixed Christmas date.
Between winter and summer, around the spring equinox, stands the Várblót – the spring and fertility feast, closely connected with the Vanir (Freyr and Freyja). Now sacrifice was made for sowing and thriving. We treat this time in detail in the article on Ostara, Várblót & Sigrblót – including the honest question of how much of "Ostara" is really attested.
At the beginning of summer stands the Sigrblót, the victory sacrifice. Now begins the bright, active time – travel, trade and, in old times, the war expedition. Into the centre moves Odin as god of victory, together with Thor, who subdues the frost giants. People asked for victory and success for the undertakings of summer. The third of the three Snorric blóts thus closes the cycle of the year.
The bright time is crowned by the solstice celebrations at midsummer. Fire customs at the longest night are folk-attested across large parts of Europe – but for a fixed, ancient Germanic "midsummer blót" the source situation is thin. We honestly call the solstice fires what they are: a strong, old fire and light custom whose concrete Germanic form we know only in part.
The most impressive feast of the Germania period is described by Tacitus: the cult of the earth goddess Nerthus. In a sacred grove on an island stood her veiled wagon. When the goddess was "present", the wagon was driven through the land by cattle, and everywhere there reigned peace – all weapons rested, no war, no violence, until the goddess returned to her grove. Afterwards slaves cleansed wagon and image in a lake – and were drowned. Feast, peace, fertility and a dark sacrificial core belong here inseparably together. The Nerthus cult shows how old and how continental the Germanic festival belief was, long before the Viking Age.
For the continental Germani – our immediate ancestors in the Rhineland and beyond – the source situation is especially difficult, but not empty. Bede transmits Germanic month names: the Módraniht ("Mothers' Night") at Christmas, the Blótmónath ("sacrifice month") in November, the Éosturmónath in spring. The Frankish penitentials and the Indiculus superstitionum forbid food offerings at springs, stones and trees, need-fires and nocturnal processions – and thereby prove indirectly that precisely these customs were alive.
In the Rhineland the Matronae are also attested – mother goddesses with baskets of fruit, to whom people sacrificed in sanctuaries of their own – and the sea and trade goddess Nehalennia on the North Sea coast. Such regional cults show: the Germanic festival world was no uniform system but a web of local customs. Some of it echoes to this day – in the Twelve Nights, in the Easter fire, in the Martinmas and solstice fires.
You need not go to a museum to find the Germanic festival belief – it is in every week. Tuesday bears the name of the war and assembly god Tíwaz/Tiw, Wednesday was once Woden's/Odin's day, Thursday belongs to Donar/Thor, and Friday to the goddess Frija/Freyja. Formed as a Germanic translation of the Roman planetary days, these names survived Christianisation – a quiet proof of how deeply the gods were anchored in everyday life. Whoever says "Thursday" today calls, without knowing it, upon an old god.
Whoever wishes to keep the old feasts today should know what is attested and what is not. Attested are the three blóts, Yule, the Winter Nights, the Dísablót, the Álfablót, the Várblót and the Sigrblót – if with patchy dates. Attested are blót, the toasting of memory, the boastful vow and the Nerthus procession. On this ground one can celebrate with a good conscience.
Whoever wants to be precise will find in our blót calendar and in the Germanic lunar calendar the attested feasts cleanly separated from modern interpretation – and in the great comparison page on the wheel-of-the-year feasts the honest juxtaposition of Germanic, Norse and Celtic. For a good custom needs no invented ancient story. It carries itself.
Ostara, Várblót & Sigrblót · The solstice festivals · Sunna / Sól · The Norse pantheon.
Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla (Ynglinga saga, Hákonar saga góða). Sigvatr Þórðarson, Austrfararvísur. A. E. Zautner, Der gebundene Mondkalender der Germanen. Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology; Jan de Vries, Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte; Walter Baetke, Die Religion der Germanen in Quellenzeugnissen.
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