Grýla is a child-eating troll-woman of Icelandic folklore, and the Yule Lads, the Jólasveinar, are her thirteen sons, who come down from the mountains one per night from 12 to 24 December. Her name already appears in thirteenth-century texts, her Christmas role only arrives in the seventeenth century, and the modern line-up of lads was fixed by a children's book in 1932. Here is what the evidence actually shows, from a taunt in Sturlunga saga and a royal ban of 1746 to the shoe in the window.
Picture an Icelandic farm in the 1700s. Turf walls, a fish-oil lamp barely glowing, snow piling against the door and only a few grey hours of daylight. In that darkness, adults told children about creatures who came down from the mountains, sniffed through door cracks and craved food. They did not come with presents. They came to take you away.
Today the story sounds a lot friendlier. The Jólasveinar, literally the "Yule lads" or "Christmas fellows", are a mix of Saint Nicholas, goblin and slapstick act. They wave from shop windows, sing in kindergartens, turn up on television and fill shoes on windowsills. Their mother Grýla, on the other hand, has never quite shaken off her reputation as a child-eater.
We wanted to know how old each piece of this really is. The answer is surprising. The name Grýla is medieval. Her role as a Christmas bogey belongs to the early modern period. And the famous thirteen Yule Lads with fixed names and arrival dates are, in their present form, a product of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If you are looking for ancient Viking belief here, you are looking in the wrong place. If you want to see how living folklore actually works, there are few better examples anywhere.
The oldest trace leads to Icelandic literature of the thirteenth century. At the end of Snorri Sturluson's Skáldskaparmál, the part of the Prose Edda that teaches poetic language, several manuscripts carry the so-called þulur: rhymed name lists for gods, giants, swords, ships and also troll-women. Whether Snorri composed these lists himself or simply took them over is still debated. Among roughly sixty names for troll-wives, Grýla appears, bare and without a story. No cauldron, no sack, no children, no Christmas. You can read more about Snorri and his work and about where the Edda comes from on our blog.
The scholar William Sayers studied this list of troll-wives and pointed out that Grýla is the best attested of all its names in other texts. He links the name to a word family for terror and dread, related for instance to Old English gryre, "horror". Grýla would then mean something like "the terrible one" or "the one who frightens". Etymologies always involve a degree of interpretation, but this one fits remarkably well.
A second witness sits in Íslendinga saga by Sturla Þórðarson, the great account of thirteenth-century feuds preserved in the compilation known as Sturlunga saga. There an attacker approaching a farmhouse with his men compares himself, roughly speaking, to Grýla coming down into the homefield with fifteen tails behind her. It is a taunt, not a myth, and that makes it valuable: the listeners had to know who Grýla was, or the joke would have fallen flat. She was clearly a bogey everyone could picture.
The third source is the oddest. Sverris saga, the life of King Sverrir of Norway, was written from the 1180s onwards by the Icelandic abbot Karl Jónsson, partly from the king's own dictation. According to its prologue, the first part of the book was called "Grýla". The title was meant to show that Sverrir's growing power foreshadowed greater things. To his enemies, the rising king may well have looked like a monster coming down the hill. Again, nothing to do with Christmas, but proof that the word was well known in the North around 1200.
Look beyond Iceland and the picture widens. The folklorist Terry Gunnell, in his study of the origins of drama in Scandinavia, showed that related names were used in the Faroes, Orkney and Shetland for disguised groups who went from house to house at certain festivals, such as the grøleks of Shetland. The bogey had a playful side too, with masks, straw, skins and noise. How far any of this reaches back before the conversion to Christianity, the sources simply do not tell us.
It took around four hundred years before Grýla was firmly attached to Christmas. Only in the seventeenth century do the first Grýlukvæði, "Grýla poems", link her to the season. Poets such as Guðmundur Erlendsson and Stefán Ólafsson of Vallanes are named in this context. According to the Icelandic folklorist Árni Björnsson, a poem attributed to Stefán Ólafsson also contains the first written use of the word jólasveinn.
The early Grýla is a strangely shabby figure. In the oldest poems she is a scrounging beggar who goes from farm to farm and asks parents to hand over their naughty children. You could fob her off with food or simply chase her away. At first she lived in a small cottage. Only later texts move her home to a remote cave in the mountains. The image of a giant, horned ogress with sack and cauldron grows verse by verse.
Descriptions from the nineteenth century then go into lurid detail: horns, claws, several eyes, a beard, an endless tongue. The details vary wildly from teller to teller. What all versions share is the appetite. Grýla likes nothing better than disobedient children. That places her in the large European family of nursery bogeys, from the Black Man to the bogeyman, only with a distinctly Icelandic taste for the blunt and the grim.
One of the best twists in the story comes from administrative law. In the eighteenth century Iceland was part of the Danish realm, and the court of Christian VI was strongly shaped by Pietism, a devotional movement that put great weight on religious upbringing at home. After the clergyman Ludvig Harboe made a long visitation tour of Iceland in the 1740s, the crown issued a set of ordinances on schooling, church life and household discipline.
One of them, in 1746, was the "Tilskipan um hús-agann á Íslandi", the ordinance on household discipline in Iceland. It laid down how parents and masters should bring up children and servants. And, as Árni Björnsson has shown, it contained an explicit ban on frightening children with Yule Lads. The Danish original used the word "julesvend", which the Icelandic version rendered with the plural jólasveinum. Officials in Copenhagen thought scaring children was harmful enough to write a clause against it.
How firmly Grýla and her sons were already fixed as bogeys is shown by a small detail from 1800. When a book on education by the German Enlightenment writer Joachim Heinrich Campe was translated into Icelandic, the translator turned the German "Schwarzer Mann", the Black Man, into "Grýlu og jólasveinana", Grýla and the Yule Lads. They had simply become the Icelandic word for the thing that frightens children.
Grýla does not live alone. Her best-known husband is Leppalúði, a name you could loosely render as "rag lout". In the poems he is lazy, old and mostly stays at home while Grýla goes hunting. Tradition knows other husbands too. Names such as Boli and Gustur turn up in different sources, and Leppalúði is often said to be her third. The order of these marriages varies from teller to teller.
The offspring are even more numerous. Folk verses list dozens of children, and Árni Björnsson speaks of almost eighty known by name. Most are forgotten today. What survives is the group that sets out at Christmas: the Jólasveinar. In some older versions they are not even Grýla's sons but her brothers, and Giljagaur, now the second lad, is still Grýla's brother in the eighteenth-century poem.
If you visit Iceland now, you will usually find the family placed in Dimmuborgir, a bizarre lava field near Lake Mývatn in the north. That their cave lies right there is a modern and very successful piece of tourism. The old poems speak of quite different, often vague mountain caves.
You will meet related beings in our articles on trolls from the giants of the Edda to the mountain spirits of the sagas and on the giants (jötnar). Grýla belongs to exactly this line: out of the nameless crowd of troll-women in the Edda grows a leading figure of folk belief.
The household is completed by an animal found only in Iceland: Jólakötturinn, the Yule Cat. It is huge, black and hungry, and it eats anyone who has not received a new piece of clothing for the feast. In another version it "only" eats their Christmas share of food.
The first secure written mention is in Jón Árnason's folktale collection of 1862. Árni Björnsson suggests the cat grew out of an old saying: to "dress the cat" meant to go without new clothes at Christmas. The archaeologist Guðmundur Ólafsson has instead pointed to companions of Saint Nicholas in other countries. Both are interpretations, not proof.
The economic background, though, is clear. On Icelandic farms the wool from the autumn had to be spun, knitted and woven by Christmas. Hard workers received a new garment as a reward, even if it was only a pair of socks. The cat was a threat about work ethic wrapped in fur. We tell the whole story in our own article on Jólakötturinn, Iceland's Christmas cat.
Thirteen now feels carved in stone. Historically it was not. A Grýla poem from the late eighteenth century does already count thirteen Yule Lads. But other districts counted nine, and one nineteenth-century informant spoke of nine yet only managed to name eight. In the east of Iceland people even said the lads came out of the sea rather than down from the mountains.
The decisive collection came from Jón Árnason, who gathered Icelandic folktales on the model of the Brothers Grimm. His first volume appeared in Leipzig in 1862. Around 1860 he had received three lists of names. The first, from the pastor Páll Jónsson, contains thirteen names and is already very close to today's line-up: Stekkjarstaur, Giljagaur, Stúfur, Þvörusleikir, Pottasleikir, Askasleikir, Faldafeykir, Skyrgámur, Bjúgnakrækir, Gluggagægir, Gáttaþefur, Ketkrókur and Kertasníkir. The other two lists sound completely different, with names like Pönnuskuggi ("pan shadow"), Bandaleysir ("string untier") or Lampaskuggi ("lamp shadow").
In his study of Yule Lad names, Árni Björnsson collected dozens more variants from all over Iceland: Smjörhákur, the butter glutton, on Snæfellsnes; Kleinusníkir, the doughnut scrounger, in the Dalir district; Reykjasvelgur, who swallowed the smoke from smoked meat, on Barðaströnd. Almost all the names come from everyday farm life: pantry, kitchen, byre and smoke loft. The lads are not gods. They are thieves of exactly those things that were scarce and precious in winter.
That all of Iceland now welcomes the same thirteen lads in the same order is mostly thanks to one book. In 1932 the poet Jóhannes úr Kötlum (1899–1972) published the children's book "Jólin koma" ("Christmas is coming"), illustrated by Tryggvi Magnússon. It contains the poem "Jólasveinarnir", which gives each lad a stanza, a personality and a day. The poem is still under copyright, so we do not quote it here.
Jóhannes worked from Páll Jónsson's list in Jón Árnason, but changed a few things. Faldafeykir, the "hem flapper", became Hurðaskellir, the Door Slammer, and that one stuck. Pottasleikir became Pottaskefill, and for Skyrgámur he wrote Skyrjarmur. That last change did not survive, and the skyr lover is called Skyrgámur again today. The same book also holds the poem about the Yule Cat that made it famous across the country.
It is hard to overstate the influence of this single book. It arrived at a time when Iceland was reinventing itself as a modern nation and schools, radio and later television created shared images. Many local variants turned into one national canon. Folklore is not only what "the people" have told since time immemorial. Quite often it is what a good poet writes down at the right moment.
Here is today's standard line-up with the meaning of each name and the day of arrival. Each lad stays thirteen days. From 25 December they leave again in the same order, the last one, Kertasníkir, on 6 January, Þrettándinn, the thirteenth day of Christmas.
| Name | Meaning | Arrives |
|---|---|---|
| Stekkjarstaur | Sheep-pen Post; pesters the sheep, has stiff legs | 12 December |
| Giljagaur | Gully Oaf; sneaks into the cowshed for milk froth | 13 December |
| Stúfur | Stubby, the smallest; scrapes burnt bits from pans | 14 December |
| Þvörusleikir | Spoon Licker; a þvara is a long wooden stirring spoon | 15 December |
| Pottaskefill | Pot Scraper; scrapes leftovers from pots | 16 December |
| Askasleikir | Bowl Licker; an askur is a lidded wooden bowl | 17 December |
| Hurðaskellir | Door Slammer; bangs doors at night | 18 December |
| Skyrgámur | Skyr Glutton; loves the Icelandic dairy food skyr | 19 December |
| Bjúgnakrækir | Sausage Swiper; steals smoked sausages from the rafters | 20 December |
| Gluggagægir | Window Peeper; peers through windows | 21 December |
| Gáttaþefur | Doorway Sniffer; smells the laufabrauð | 22 December |
| Ketkrókur | Meat Hook; fishes for smoked meat | 23 December |
| Kertasníkir | Candle Beggar; craves tallow candles | 24 December |
A few words need explaining. A stekkur is a small pen in which lambs were separated from the ewes in spring. Laufabrauð, "leaf bread", is a wafer-thin flatbread cut into patterns and fried in fat, still a Christmas staple in northern Iceland. And tallow candles were not only light but, at a pinch, food. That the Candle Beggar arrives on Christmas Eve makes good sense: candles were the most precious gift of the dark season.
The most important custom around the Yule Lads today is also one of the youngest. From 11 December onwards, Icelandic children put a shoe on the windowsill every evening. During the night the lad of the day drops by and leaves a little something: sweets, a small toy, a mandarin. Children who misbehaved find a potato in the shoe instead.
When exactly this custom began is not securely dated. It plays no part in the older sources and apparently spread during the twentieth century. The resemblance to the continental European Saint Nicholas shoe is so obvious that outside influence seems likely. It is not documented, though, so we leave it as a likely guess.
The shoe also brought a change of image. Since the mid-twentieth century the lads have increasingly appeared in red caps, sometimes with bushy white beards, looking like the international Santa Claus. Many Icelanders deliberately keep the "real" version alive, in woollen clothes and farm dress, as Tryggvi Magnússon drew them in 1932. Both versions live side by side, with a certain wink.
If you travel to Reykjavík in December, you will meet the family everywhere. Since 2018 a glowing Yule Cat several metres tall has stood in the city centre. In children's songs and plays Grýla is now often more of a cranky old woman than a monster. Her bite has not vanished completely, though. In Iceland a little shiver belongs to Christmas as surely as smoked lamb.
The number thirteen is not a pagan legacy either. It most likely follows the Christian calendar, which counts the days from Christmas to Epiphany as thirteen. The lads simply spread themselves across that span and the days before it. Links to a lunar year or ancient magic numbers are modern associations with no basis in the sources.
Even so, the connection to the old Yule is not plucked from thin air. It just lies somewhere other than the tourist brochures suggest. Old Norse jól was a midwinter feast about which the sources say frustratingly little. In Hákonar saga góða, Snorri reports that King Hákon moved the Yule feast to the Christian date of Christmas. In Iceland, the word jól simply stayed on as the name for Christmas. How much is really known about this feast is explained in detail in Yule, the feast of the long nights and in our overview of Germanic festivals and pagan holidays.
What old Yule and the world of the Yule Lads share above all is a mood: midwinter as a dangerous, open time when the borders between farm and wilderness, between people and the uncanny, grow thin. Scandinavia and Central Europe know similar ideas, such as the Wild Hunt of the twelve nights or household spirits like the nisse and tomte, who demand their porridge at Christmas. The belief that the dead draw near at Yule belongs to the same family, as you can read in ancestor veneration at Yule.
The winter solstice itself, the lowest point of the year's light, falls right in the middle of the lads' visits, around 21 December. How people in the North experienced that turning point, and which customs are genuinely old, is the subject of our article on solstice celebrations. And if you want to know how Icelanders and Scandinavians divided the year, with winter months such as Þorri, take a look at our Old Norse calendar. At the very end of winter another Icelandic feast is waiting, one that looks older than it is: Þorrablót.
What makes these figures so tough? Perhaps their down-to-earth nature. The Yule Lads do not steal souls or hoards of gold. They steal sausages, milk froth, candles and the scrapings from the pot. Their names are an inventory of the old Icelandic farm, and anyone reciting them today unknowingly calls up a vanished world of turf houses, smoke lofts and wooden bowls. The trolls keep safe the things people have lost.
And Grýla? She shows how a single name in a medieval list can grow, over centuries, into an entire family, with a husband, a cat, dozens of children, laws against her and poems about her. That is no faded copy of the Viking Age. It is Icelandic cultural history in its purest form. For us in the workshop, that is exactly the appeal of figures like these: you do not need to invent a fake ancient pedigree to give them weight. Their true story is good enough.
So if you meet an Icelandic child this December running excitedly to the windowsill in the morning, you now know what lies behind it: eight centuries of language, four hundred years of Christmas scares, and a poet who brought order to the troll family in 1932.
Who is Grýla in Icelandic folklore? Grýla is a troll-woman who comes for naughty children and cooks them in her cauldron. Her name is attested from the thirteenth century, but she only appears as a Christmas figure in the seventeenth century.
How many Yule Lads are there in Iceland? Today there are thirteen Jólasveinar, who arrive one by one from 12 to 24 December. Historically the number varied by region, and some districts knew only nine.
When does the first Yule Lad arrive? Stekkjarstaur comes on the night before 12 December, so children put their shoe in the window on the evening of 11 December. The last, Kertasníkir, arrives on Christmas Eve.
Are the Yule Lads a Viking tradition? No. There is no evidence from the Viking Age. The figures took shape in early modern Icelandic folklore, and today's line-up dates from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
What does the Icelandic Yule Cat eat? According to legend, Jólakötturinn eats anyone who has not received a new piece of clothing for Christmas. Behind it lies the push to finish the wool work before the feast.
Who decided there are 13 Yule Lads? The names go back to lists Jón Árnason published in 1862. The order and characters were fixed by the poem "Jólasveinarnir" by Jóhannes úr Kötlum in the 1932 book "Jólin koma".
For courage. For remembrance. For legends that live on.
Jól – the Yule feast · The Yule Cat · Þorrablót – the winter feast · The Germanic feasts · The solstice festivals.
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