What Was Yule? The Old Midwinter Word Behind Christmas

The short answer

Yule is one of the oldest words in English for the dark heart of winter. Among the Anglo-Saxons it named a stretch of the calendar around the winter solstice, and its Scandinavian relative, jol, named a midwinter feast. After England became Christian, the word attached itself to the Christmas season, and for centuries "Yule" and "Christmas" meant much the same thing.

What the word does not give us is a detailed picture of a pre-Christian holiday. The written evidence is thin, much of it was set down by Christian authors long after the fact, and some popular claims about Yule customs cannot be traced back nearly as far as people assume.

Bede and the Anglo-Saxon "Giuli" months

Our earliest English evidence comes from the monk Bede, whose book The Reckoning of Time was written in the 720s. Listing the months of the old English calendar, Bede says that December was called Giuli, "the same name by which January is called." Later Old English writers distinguished the two as the earlier and the later Yule.

Bede adds that the English began their year on December 25, and that the night Christians held sacred was once known by a heathen name, Modranecht, or "mother's night," which he connected with ceremonies kept all that night. He says nothing more about what those ceremonies were.

Historians handle this passage with care. The Online Etymology Dictionary describes the Anglian giuli as a two-month midwinter season, a time of important feasts but not itself a festival. Wordorigins notes that Bede's chapter is partly a polemic against pagan practice, which is a reason not to treat every detail as a neutral report.

Jol in the North

In Scandinavia the related word jol named a midwinter feast. Etymologists treat the English and Norse words as cousins descended from a shared Germanic root of unknown origin, not as one borrowed from the other.

The best-known description comes from the Saga of Hakon the Good in Heimskringla. According to the saga, King Hakon, a Christian ruling a largely heathen Norway, made a law that Yule should begin at the same time Christian people held their festival, and that every man must brew a set measure of malt into ale and keep the feast as long as it lasted. Before his reign, the saga says, Yule began on midwinter night and was kept for three days.

That account is valuable but late. Heimskringla was compiled by the Icelander Snorri Sturluson (c. 1179 to 1241), roughly three centuries after Hakon's lifetime, so it tells us how a medieval Christian writer remembered Yule rather than giving an eyewitness view of pagan practice.

How Yule came to mean Christmas

Once the English converted, the old seasonal word narrowed. In later Old English, geola came to mean the Christmas season, and more specifically the twelve days between Christmas and Epiphany. The Middle English form was Yol.

"Christmas" eventually won out. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, by the 11th century it had largely replaced "yule" across England, except in the northeast, the region of heaviest Danish settlement, where yule remained the usual word. So by the time of Henry V, Christmas had long been the everyday English name for the feast.

"Yule" never vanished, though. Nineteenth-century writers revived it to evoke the Christmas of "Merrie England," which is one reason the word now feels so wrapped in old-fashioned festive charm.

The Yule log: younger than you might think

Few customs are described as more ancient than the Yule log, yet its paper trail in Britain is surprisingly recent. The historian Francis Young writes that the oldest uncontested mentions of Yule logs in Britain date from the 17th century.

The poet Robert Herrick's Hesperides, published in 1648, calls on "merry, merry boys" to bring "the Christmas log to the firing" and to light the new block with last year's brand. The Online Etymology Dictionary dates the compounds "yule log" and "yule block" to the mid-17th century as well.

Was the custom much older than its first records? Possibly. Young points out that log customs appear across the Germanic, Baltic, Finnic and Slavic worlds, which could hint at a shared older tradition. But he dismisses the 18th-century antiquary Henry Bourne's claim that the log stood for the returning sun as speculation, and suggests the log is perhaps better understood as the wooden equivalent of a Christmas goose or turkey: a seasonal treat. For a family in 1420, a ceremonial Yule log is simply not documented.

What historians know, and what they don't

Put together, the evidence supports a modest but genuine picture.

• Known: Yule was an Old English name for a midwinter period covering December and January, recorded by Bede.
• Known: Norse jol was a midwinter feast, remembered in medieval sagas for its drinking and feasting.
• Known: In English, Yule became a synonym for the Christmas season and later gave way to the word Christmas.
• Uncertain: What rituals, if any, pre-Christian English people actually performed at Yule.
• Disputed: The idea that the Yule log, or Christmas as a whole, is a direct survival of a pagan solstice festival. The direct evidence for the log begins in the 17th century.

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