How ‘Yule’ went from animal sacrifice to Christmas carols : NPR

A family at their Victorian Christmas dinner, circa 1840.

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Hulton Archives/Hulton Archives

On a cold December night in Sandy Spring, Maryland, dozens of people crowded into the Woodlawn mansion for a Victorian-era Christmas dance class, the floors creaking under the uncertain steps of 21st-century folk learning 19th-century English country dances.

“Every good holiday has dancing,” said Angela Yau, a parks department historical interpreter who taught the dances – and Victorians loved a good Christmas party.

Angela Yau, a site manager for the Montgomery County Parks Department who also works in cultural and natural history interpretation, wears an 1840s-style dress while teaching Victorian dances in the room.

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Natalie Escobar/NPR

The joy was emblematic of what many think of Christmas; today it is synonymous with Christmas. But centuries ago, before crooners sang Christmas carols by the fire, Christmas meant something different: a pagan midwinter celebration around the solstice, dating back to pre-Christian Germanic people.

This was especially important for Scandinavian communities at this time of year, dealing with late sunrises and early sunsets, according to Maren Johnson, a professor of Nordic studies at Luther College.

“All of these types of winter traditions are closely tied to small communities,” she said. “You create folklore among yourselves about this winter and this period of darkness.”

In this week’s issue of “Word of the Week,” we travel back in time to the origins of Christmas and trace those early traditions to today’s Christmas celebrations.

Feasting, drinking and animal sacrifices

According to Old Norse translator Jackson Crawford, scholars of these early pagan festivals don’t have much concrete evidence of what actually happened there, because much of the written records come from much later Christians. But what is clear, he says, is that feasting and drinking were plentiful.

Terry Gunnell, professor of folkloristics at the University of Iceland, agrees. Drinking large quantities of beer was not only encouraged but obligatory, he said, and animals were slaughtered as part of the sacrifices to the gods and spirits typical of these early holidays.

“The snow is coming down from the mountains, and in a sense the spirits of nature are coming closer,” he said – and people wanted to appease them.

And then there was the oath. Crawford said this was one of the main features of early Christmas celebrations, as evidenced by myths such as The saga of Hervör and Heidrek from the 13th century. In it, a man swears to the king of Sweden that he will marry his daughter with no real prospect of doing so.

“But your oaths during Christmas are somehow sacred and extremely binding,” he said. “So he must try to accomplish it,” even if he ends up getting killed.

Crawford believes this oath may be the origin of the word “Yule.” The earliest roots may have come from Indo-European words for “to speak,” he said, and then Germanic peoples came to use it for more judicial purposes, such as admitting, confessing or swearing.

There are other theories, however, the main one being that the word may come from the Old Norse word. hjolmeaning “wheel” – as in the “wheel of the year” that continues to turn throughout the seasons, Gunnell said.

Yule is co-opted at Christmas

The Christianization of this part of Europe, however, changed the way people celebrated Christmas. The Church began aligning its own holidays with pagan celebrations, Gunnell said. Easter replaced the festival of early summer, for example, and Midsummer replaced midsummer. “And then we hear in Icelandic sources that [Yule] has been replaced by Christmas,” he said.

“So what the Church is really doing is allowing people to continue doing what they were doing before, but now under a Christian name,” he added.

According to Crawford, around the 900s, Scandinavians began saying “Christmas” and “Christmas” interchangeably.

“I think it suggests that, fundamentally, the two are parties,” he said.

This is not to say that Christmas was exactly the same as the Christmas celebrations of old. The emphasis was, Gunnell says, not so much on the spirits of winter as on “a time of joy with the birth of Christ.” But much of the spirit of Christmas partying and drinking remained – and became a Christmas tradition in much of Europe.

Fast forward to the Victorian era, where the spirit of merriment became ingrained in English culture, thanks to two important cultural influencers: Prince Albert, who imported traditional Christmas customs popular in his native Germany, and Queen Victoria.

The queen fell in love with these traditions, said Yau of the parks department. And because she was a fashion icon, “these Christmas traditions really spread from the royal couple throughout England, the colonies and everywhere in between.” And, as cultural customs are wont to do, traditions morphed – creating, among other things, Santa Claus.

I still make sacrifices – just sweeter

Although the slaughter of animals to please the spirits of winter may be less typical of modern Christmas celebrations, the spirit of sacrifice remains, according to Gunnell.

This is especially true in Scandinavian Christmas folklore. People leave out porridge niss And Tomte, little trickster spirits who live in the local forests, around the winter solstice hoping to appease them or receive gifts. (Though these days, Johnson says, many Scandinavians also celebrate Julenissemore of a Santa Claus figure.)

In Iceland, there isn’t really a Santa figure, Gunnell said. Instead, there are the “Christmas Men,” also known as the Yule Lads. As the stories tell, mystical men – with names like “Window Peeper”, “Sausage Swiper”, “Bowl Licker” and “Meat Hook” – descend one by one from the mountains of your community, playing pranks and stealing items from homes. (To be fair to them, they’ll also leave presents in windows for the children.) On top of that, they have an ogress mother, Grýla, who eats misbehaving children “like sushi for Christmas,” Gunnell said.

And even though he doesn’t eat sausages or eat children, Santa Claus isn’t a completely different character.

“The idea of ​​sacrifices is to leave out a little sherry or whiskey for Santa and a little food for the reindeer,” Gunnell said.

This is something to consider the next time you skip the cookies and milk.