What Is Yule? The Meaning, the Date, and What the Old Sources Say

October 19, 2026

Black and ivory linocut of a fur-cloaked man carrying a drinking horn through snow toward a lit log cabin at night.

Yule is an old name for midwinter. Bede says the pagan Angles called December and January Giuli. The Norse sagas use jól for a midwinter feast, and Scandinavian forms of the word became the names for Christmas. Medieval Norwegian histories describe that feast, the ale it required, and a king's law in the 900s that ordered it to begin with the Christian festival. Modern Pagans keep a Yule of their own at the December solstice. None of the Norse passages cited here puts the old feast on the solstice.

Which Yule traditions can be traced, and how far back?

The table lists the earliest evidence cited in this article for each piece of the Yule picture.

Custom or claim	Earliest evidence cited here	What the record shows
The word Yule	Bede, 725	Two Anglo-Saxon months, December and January, both called Giuli. A Gothic fragment may be older, but its reading is disputed
Yule ale required by law	Heimskringla, 1220s, describing the 900s	King Haakon's law: brew a measure of malt and keep Yule holy as long as it lasts
A feast in honor of Odin, named for his name Jólnir	Ágrip, about 1200	A medieval Christian writer's explanation of a heathen name
Mothers' Night on the night of the Nativity	Bede, 725	One sentence, and Bede says he is guessing at the rites
Christmas on December 25	Chronography of 354	The birth of Christ listed under December 25
The Yule log	Herrick, 1648	An English poem that calls it the Christmas log
The Wild Hunt riding at Christmas	Norwegian folklore, as recorded in Store norske leksikon	A host of the dead or spirits in the Christmas sky; the entries trace the belief to older Germanic lore
Yule as a solstice sabbat	Wicca, 1950s	One of the eight festivals of the Wheel of the Year

Ágrip and Heimskringla attest the feast. Neither ties it to the December solstice or to the sun. Bede's sun explanation belongs to the English month name, and the sun reading of the Norse feast is one of three modern interpretations listed below.

What does Yule mean?

Bede gives the oldest explanation cited here. In The Reckoning of Time, dated 725, he lists the months of the pagan Angles and says that December and January were both called Giuli. He connects the name with the return of the sun towards the increase of the day: one Giuli month fell before the turn and one after it. The Cleasby and Vigfusson dictionary of Old Norse calls the origin of jól "much contested".

In Iceland the Yule month, jólmánuðr, ran from mid-December to mid-January, the same twin stretch around the solstice that Bede describes. M. J. Driscoll, the editor of the Norwegian history Ágrip, says the Scandinavians kept jól, the name of their pre-Christian midwinter feast, as the name of the Christian celebration that gradually replaced it, and that the Old English sense survives in the modern English words Yule and Yuletide. Norwegian and Swedish still call Christmas jul.

A possibly older witness is disputed. A Gothic liturgical calendar, surviving as a palimpsest in Codex Ambrosianus A in Milan that may date to the sixth century, carries the heading fruma Jiuleis, which the Wulfila Project prints under the month name Naubaimbair, November. The heading has been read as a reference to Yule, with fruma as "first." The word for November is probably not in the manuscript at all, Roger Pearse calls the meaning much debated, and David Landau has argued that jiuleis cannot mean Yule, so treat it as a possibility rather than a first mention.

When is Yule?

There are three dates, depending on whose Yule you mean.

In Norway before King Haakon's reform, Yule began on midwinter night. Snorri Sturluson, writing Heimskringla in the 1220s, says that before Haakon the beginning of Yule, or the slaughter night, was the night of mid-winter, and Yule was kept for three days thereafter. The Old Norse word for that night is hökunótt, and it survives in that one passage. The dictionary that records it places the old Yule about three weeks after Christmas, near Epiphany, and the edition it quotes asks whether "three nights" should read thirteen. The Norwegian national encyclopedia puts the old midwinter day at January 12, halfway between the winter mark on October 14 and the summer mark on April 14. Gunnar Nordanskog, reviewing Andreas Nordberg's 2006 study of the pre-Christian calendar, notes that the question of when the old Yule fell has been debated since the 1600s; Nordberg's answer, as the review reports it, is a reckoning by the moon inside the solar year. None of these sources puts the feast on December 21.

In the 900s, a king's law ordered Norwegian Yule to begin with Christmas. Haakon the Good had been raised a Christian at the English court of Æthelstan and ruled Norway from the 930s to about 961. Snorri records the law: "He made a law that the festival of Yule should begin at the same time as Christian people held it". The encyclopedia puts it as an order to celebrate on December 25. Driscoll describes a gradual replacement rather than a clean switch, but the name stayed, and in the Scandinavian languages jul and Christmas are one word.

For modern Pagans, Yule is the December solstice. The Britannica entry on Wicca lists the winter solstice, or Yule, on December 21 or 22, among the eight sabbats of the Wheel of the Year. In 2026 the solstice falls on Monday, December 21, at 3:50 p.m. Eastern time, and in 2027 on December 21 at 9:42 p.m. Eastern. Wicca emerged publicly in England in the 1950s around Gerald Gardner, who lived from 1884 to 1964, and the eight-festival wheel does not seem to be traceable earlier than the 1950s. The historian Ronald Hutton traces its component festivals to different modern sources. The idea that druids kept the four quarter days comes from the Welsh antiquarian and forger Edward Williams, Margaret Murray added Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasadh and Samhain on what Hutton calls the slimmest of evidence, and Gardner made the combined wheel the centerpiece of Wicca.

What did the Norse Yule look like?

Snorri describes a drinking feast. Haakon's law also required that "every man, under penalty, should brew a meal of malt into ale, and therewith keep the Yule holy as long as it lasted". Norwegian has the expression drikke jul, to drink Yule, and the national encyclopedia treats it as simply a synonym for keeping the feast. The same entry describes the old jólablót as a sacrificial celebration of midwinter day. In the saga, Earl Sigurd entertains the king at a Yule feast at Lade, and eight chieftains later agree to meet at a Yule feast at Møre.

Ágrip says the feast honored Odin. Written around 1200, this short Norwegian history pauses to explain the name to Christian readers: "Heathen men had a feast, held in honour of Óðinn, and Óðinn is called by many names: he is called Viðrir and he is called Hár and Þriði and Jólnir; and it is after Jólnir that Yule is named." Driscoll adds that Jólnir as a name of Odin "appears elsewhere, but is not common". Snorri's Edda has the plural. In the list of words for the gods in Skáldskaparmál he gives jólnar and quotes the poet Eyvindr skáldaspillir on jólna sumbl, the feast of the gods. Ágrip derives Yule from the god's name. Nothing else cited here shows that this medieval explanation is the real etymology, and the dictionary, as noted above, calls the origin of the word contested. The encyclopedia lists the competing modern readings side by side: a feast for the sun's return, a fertility rite, or a feast for the dead. The gods themselves are in Norse Gods: Who They Were, and Who Wrote Them Down.

Is Christmas just Yule with a new name?

Haakon's law aligned Norwegian Yule with the Christian feast. The Roman evidence for the Christmas date is six centuries older than that law and does not mention Yule. The two get run together in the "pagan Christmas" argument, so they are worth taking one at a time.

Bede gives the English side. The Angles, he says, started the year on the eighth day before the calends of January, when we celebrate the Nativity of the Lord, and called that night Modranicht, the night of the mothers, "supposedly because of rites that they completed by staying up all through the night." In Bede's text that is all there is on Mothers' Night: a name and a suspicion about its rites. It ties a heathen night to the night on which the Nativity was kept in England. It does not say the church chose the date because of it.

The Roman side comes from the Chronography of 354, a calendar made for a Christian aristocrat named Valentinus with lettering by the calligrapher Furius Dionysius Filocalus. Its list of martyrs' burial days opens with VIII kal. Ian. natus Christus in Betleem Iudeae, Christ born in Bethlehem of Judea on December 25. The same manuscript's civil calendar marks December 25 with games for Invictus, the Unconquered Sun. Steven Hijmans has argued that no evidence for a December 25 feast of the sun predates the mid-fourth century, which leaves no evidence that the sun feast is older than the Christian one. Roger Pearse, summarizing that argument, notes that the Invictus entry is the only festival in the calendar whose race count is not a multiple of twelve, and he stays hesitant about reading it as a later insertion. C. P. E. Nothaft's 2012 review in Church History sets out the two rival theories of the date and calls for a more nuanced approach than either. What the Roman calendar shows is a December 25 Nativity in 354. What the Norwegian saga shows is a king moving Yule onto that date six hundred years later.

Krampus has a family-tree problem of his own, in Krampus: How the Christmas Devil Got a Fake Norse Mother.

Where do the Yule log and the Wild Hunt come from?

The earliest description of the Yule log cited here is English, and it calls the thing a Christmas log. Robert Herrick, who lived from 1591 to 1674, published his collection Hesperides in 1648. Its "Ceremonies for Christmas" opens: "Come, bring with a noise, / My merry, merry boys, / The Christmas log to the firing." The second stanza says a brand saved from last year's log lights the new one, "for good success in his spending." No log appears in the Norse passages cited here.

The Wild Hunt rides at Christmas in Norwegian folklore. The Oskoreia, also called the Åsgårdsreia or the julereia, is described in the Norwegian national encyclopedia as a noisy host of the dead or of spirits that rode through the air at Christmastime on fire-breathing horses, led by a woman called Guro Rysserova, and it ranks among the things people once feared most during the holiday. The name Åsgårdsreia points at Asgard, the home of the gods, and the entry traces the belief back to older Germanic lore of the wild hunt. Neither entry puts Odin at its head. What the Eddas do give him is in Odin's Ravens: What the Eddas Say About Huginn and Muninn.

Short answers

Is Yule the same as Christmas?

In the Scandinavian languages, jul is the word for Christmas, kept from the older feast after a tenth-century king aligned the two. In English, Yule survives as an older word for Christmastide, the sense Driscoll notes. For Wiccans and many other modern Pagans it is the winter solstice festival.

Is Yule a Norse holiday?

Bede records the English form in 725, centuries before the Norwegian histories were written. The feast we can describe in any detail comes from those histories: Ágrip, written around 1200, gives the feast for Odin, and Heimskringla, written in the 1220s, gives the ale and Haakon's tenth-century law.

How long did Yule last?

Laing's translation of Snorri says three days after midwinter night, and the dictionary that quotes the passage records a reading of thirteen. The Icelandic Yule month ran from mid-December to mid-January, but a month name does not fix the length of a feast.

What is Mothers' Night?

Bede says the pagan Angles called the night of the Nativity Modranicht, the night of the mothers, and suspects it had all-night rites. His sentence is the only account of it cited here.

From the archive

The Yule Lord is a horned winter figure in engraved linework. The Wild Hunt: Midwinter Sky Tour puts the Christmas host of the dead on a tour poster. The Yule Goat: Burning Straw sets its goat in flame.