The Yule Cat: Why Iceland's Christmas Monster Cares About New Clothes

The Yule Cat, jólakötturinn in Icelandic, is an enormous cat from Icelandic folklore that prowls at Christmas. It leaves alone anyone who has received a new piece of clothing by Christmas Eve. Everyone else, in the old phrase, "goes into the Yule Cat," which could mean being eaten or only losing your Christmas dinner. The legend first appeared in print in 1864, and Jóhannes úr Kötlum's 1932 poem for children shaped the version most often retold.

What does "going into the Yule Cat" mean?

The first printed account is a short paragraph in the second volume of Jón Árnason's collection of Icelandic folk tales, published in 1864, page 570. People believed, he wrote, that a monster called the jólaköttur was abroad at Christmas. It did no harm to anyone who got a new garment to wear on Christmas Eve. Those who got nothing new "all went into the Yule Cat." The cat then took them, or at least their jólarefur, the portion of meat and fat each member of the household was given for Christmas.

Jón's wording leaves the cat's exact crime open. Right after saying it took them, he adds a question in brackets: "(ate?)". He also says what the belief did on the farm: children and servants competed to earn a new garment from their masters before Christmas, so the cat would pass them by. A footnote gives the northern form of the phrase, "to dress the Yule Cat."

The folklorist Hrefna S. Bjartmarsdóttir places the cat among many Yule spirits known across Europe, in an answer for the University of Iceland's Vísindavefur. Their shared job, she writes, was to watch the Christmas preparations and make sure people finished the work: knitting and making clothes, baking, brewing and preparing the holiday food. People who failed were punished.

Does the Yule Cat eat people?

The tradition never settled it. The National Museum of Iceland gives two readings on its page about the Yule Cat. The more common one, held for a long time, is that the cat eats people who get no new clothes. A milder one says it eats their food. In a 2016 article in Bændablaðið, Bjartmarsdóttir also mentions the Christmas portion. She adds a belief recorded mostly in western Iceland: knitting left unfinished at Christmas turned greasy.

The museum page credits the poet Jóhannes úr Kötlum with making the cat's man-eating habits the subject of his 1932 poem, which became a main source for the modern man-eating version.

Where does the Yule Cat come from?

Nobody knows for certain. The written record is short, and most of it is recent.

Bjartmarsdóttir writes that the Yule Cat first appeared in print in 1864. She also says the oldest known Icelandic source is a remark by Árni Sigurðsson from Breiðdalur, made in the middle of the nineteenth century and not written down until 1911. The 1911 record itself was not available for this article. Árni Björnsson told Emily Zarka, for her PBS series Monstrum, that scholars do not know whether the creature was widely known in Iceland before the first folk tale collection appeared.

Scholars have offered several explanations, which the folklorist Áki Guðni Karlsson summarized in a 2020 article for Icelandic Folklore:

• The folklorist Árni Björnsson argues that the nineteenth-century record rests almost entirely on Jón Árnason's paragraph. People used phrases like "to dress the cat" for someone without new clothes, perhaps because a cat never changes its coat. Björnsson concludes that the cat was a figure of speech Jón may have misread as a monster.
• The archaeologist Guðmundur Ólafsson, writing in 1989, compares the cat with the creatures that follow Saint Nicholas in many European countries, figures often proposed as the origin of the Scandinavian Christmas goat. Karlsson notes that the saint was popular in Catholic Iceland, as the many churches dedicated to him show.
• Terry Gunnell, a folklorist at the University of Iceland, has noted the parallels with the Christmas goat and with animal disguises worn in Christmas performances, which suggests the cat may have started as a costume. Icelandic sources describe such masked dances until the eighteenth century, when the church campaigned against them.

Karlsson also reports Bjartmarsdóttir's view that the belief may have reached Iceland from the Celtic world by way of Shetland and Norway. The National Museum's own reading is a practical one: the cat was most likely a creature meant to keep the household working hard, with a new garment from the masters as the reward. Visit Reykjavík, the city's tourism site, is more specific: farmers used the threat to get their workers to finish processing the autumn wool before Christmas.

Why does the Yule Cat care about new clothes?

The fear of greeting Christmas in old clothes is older than the cat and wider than Iceland. The philologist Alan S. C. Ross traced it in an article in the Saga-Book of the Viking Society, in the volume dated 1937 to 1945. His starting point is a poem by William Dunbar, the Scottish court poet. Dunbar casts himself as an old gray horse, worn out by service, and asks King James IV for his Christmas present. Each stanza ends with the same plea:

"Schir, lat it never in toune be tald / That I suld be ane Yuillis yald!"

Ross reads "Yuillis yald" as the Yule jade of later Scots, a jade being a worn-out horse. He found the phrase in later Scottish sources too:

• Morayshire, about 1780: no woman would leave her knitting or flax unfinished on Christmas Eve, for fear of becoming "Yule's yaud" for the coming year.
• Banffshire, about 1890: whoever had no new piece of clothing at Christmas was called "Yeel's Jade," a name that carried a little reproach.
• Norway, from the Danish folklorist H. F. Feilberg: in Salten the Yule Lads were said to take people who had no new clothes for Christmas, and in Sunnmøre the New Year's Goat did the same at New Year.

Ross concluded that Dunbar's "Yuillis yald" and the Icelandic "going into the Yule Cat" mean much the same thing. Bjartmarsdóttir makes a similar point in Bændablaðið: the importance of new clothes for Christmas is known well beyond Iceland, while the cat's part in it appears to be specifically Icelandic.

What does the 1932 Yule Cat poem say?

Jóhannes úr Kötlum's "Jólakötturinn" appeared in Jólin koma ("Christmas Is Coming"), his book of Christmas poems for children, first published in 1932. The poet's publication list records a 30th printing in 2013. The poem is still under copyright, so here is a summary.

A huge cat with glowing eyes, whiskers like spikes and an arched back roams the freezing Christmas snow. It hunts people, not mice. It falls on the poor who got nothing new to wear and takes their Christmas food, and usually eats it too. To keep it from snatching the little ones, the women raced at the carding combs, the loom and the spinning wheel, knitting a bright scrap of cloth or a small sock. On Christmas Eve the children stood holding an apron or a pair of shoes, and the cat, which may eat no one with a new garment, hissed and ran off. In the last stanzas the poet wonders whether the cat still exists and asks readers to look for children who still get nothing.

According to Karlsson, the same book fixed the names, number and order of the modern Yule Lads and made Grýla and Leppalúði their parents. He adds that Ingibjörg Þorbergs's song about the cat reached a new generation in 1987, when Björk recorded it for the Christmas album Hvít er borg og bær.

Is the Yule Cat Grýla's pet?

Only in modern retellings. Jón Árnason lists the cat as a separate creature, roaming at Christmas "besides the Yule Lads." In Jólin koma the cat has its own poem and no link to Grýla, her husband Leppalúði or their sons. Karlsson suggests that printing them in one book was enough to bring the man-eating cat into the family of man-eating trolls. By the middle of the twentieth century the cat appeared as the Yule Lads' pet.

The National Museum says the cat is sometimes said to live with Grýla and Leppalúði now, but seems to be a fairly recent arrival in their cave. Reykjavík City is just as careful. It says the cat is often called their pet today, but that nobody can say whether it really lives with them or where it comes from. In many modern pictures, Karlsson notes, Grýla looks like a witch with a broom and a big pot, with the Yule Cat as her familiar.

Who are Grýla and the Yule Lads?

Grýla is much older than her cat. Her name appears in a medieval list of names for troll-women, printed with Snorri Sturluson's Edda. In an episode of Sturlunga saga set in 1221, a man named Loptr rides into a farmyard and recites a couplet: "Here comes Grýla down into the yard, and she has fifteen tails."

In the oldest Christmas poem about her, from around 1640 according to Katelin Parsons's study in Gripla, she asks for a child to put in her gray bag and threatens to bite the children. A rhyme recorded by Jón Árnason in 1862 gives her fifteen tails with a hundred bags on each, and twenty children in every bag. Modern tellings keep her appetite. According to Visit Iceland, she comes down from the mountains at Christmas, puts misbehaving children in a sack and carries them to her cave, where her favorite dish is naughty children boiled in a cauldron.

Her sons, the Yule Lads (jólasveinar), were never a fixed group in the old tradition. Árni Björnsson writes that different regions had groups of 13, 9 and 18, and none of them covered the whole country. Records preserve as many as eighty names. Jón Árnason first printed thirteen names in 1862. Jóhannes úr Kötlum's 1932 poems kept almost the same list and swapped in Hurðaskellir, the Door Slammer, for Faldafeykir, and that is the set Icelanders know today.

The National Museum of Iceland gives one arrival date for each:

In Jón Árnason's account the first one leaves again on Christmas Day, and the last on Twelfth Night, January 6.

In the eighteenth century, scaring children with the lads was common enough for the law to notice. A Danish royal decree on household discipline in Iceland, issued in 1746, ordered an end to "the foolish habit" of scaring children with the so-called Yule Lad, or with ghosts. Grýla is not named in it, although popular accounts often say she was banned. The gift-giving lads came later: the shoe children leave in the window for them arrived with sailors before 1930 and became general around 1960.

Where can you see the Yule Cat today?

In downtown Reykjavík. The city first put up a giant lit Yule Cat on Lækjartorg square in 2018, and it was switched on again in November 2025. It is about five meters (16 feet) tall and six meters (20 feet) wide, with 6,500 LED lights, and was designed by the city with MK-illumination of Austria and the company Garðlist.

From the archive

The cat crouches over a snowed-in turf farmhouse in The Yule Cat: Snowfall Prowl and waits by a small fire in The Yule Cat: By the Campfire. Grýla stirs her pot in the snow, with a full sack beside her, in Gryla: The Winter Cauldron. These are contemporary designs drawing on the folklore.

For the Alpine monster who handles naughty children farther south, read Krampus: How the Christmas Devil Got a Fake Norse Mother.

Sources

• Jón Árnason, Íslenzkar þjóðsögur og æfintýri, vol. 2, Leipzig, 1864, p. 570, section "Venjur," with footnote 2. The monster, the garment rule, the "(át?)," the Christmas portion, the competition for new clothes, and the northern phrase. Grýla's tails and bags, and the Yule Lads' names and departures, from vol. 1, 1862, sections "Grýla" and "Fjölskylda Grýlu", at Wikisource.
• Hrefna Sigríður Bjartmarsdóttir, "Hver er uppruni jólakattarins?", Vísindavefur, University of Iceland, December 23, 2005. The Yule Cat among European Yule spirits that oversee Christmas work.
• Hrefna S. Bjartmarsdóttir, "Jólakötturinn: uppruni hans, ættir og hlutverk", Bændablaðið, December 22, 2016. First print in 1864, Árni Sigurðsson's remark recorded in 1911, Dunbar, the greasy knitting, and the cat's role as specifically Icelandic.
• National Museum of Iceland, "Jólakötturinn", archived December 22, 2015. The two readings of the phrase, Jóhannes úr Kötlum's man-eating cat, the work-incentive reading, and the cat as a recent arrival in Grýla's cave.
• Áki Guðni Karlsson, "The Yule Cat", Icelandic Folklore, December 17, 2020, archived March 25, 2023. Summaries of the theories of Árni Björnsson, Guðmundur Ólafsson, Terry Gunnell and Bjartmarsdóttir, Jólin koma in 1932, the cat as the Yule Lads' pet, Grýla's modern image, and Björk's 1987 recording.
• Alan S. C. Ross, "Jólaköttur, Yuillis yald and similar expressions", Saga-Book of the Viking Society XII, 1937 to 1945, pp. 1 to 18. Dunbar's refrain, the Morayshire and Banffshire evidence, and Feilberg's Norwegian parallels.
• Jóhannes úr Kötlum, "Jólakötturinn", from Jólin koma, 1932. Summarized, not quoted. Publication date and printings from the poet's publication list.
• "Nafnaþulur", stanza 12, the troll-women's names, edition of Guðni Jónsson at Heimskringla.no.
• Guðbrandur Vigfússon, editor, Sturlunga saga, vol. 1, Oxford, 1878, Íslendinga saga, the year 1221. Loptr's couplet about Grýla's fifteen tails.
• Katelin Parsons, "Grýla in Sléttuhlíð", Gripla 24, 2013. The date of the oldest Christmas Grýla poem, its bag and its threat to children.
• Árni Björnsson, "Voru jólasveinarnir einhvern tímann 9 talsins?", Vísindavefur, December 18, 2007. Regional groups of 13, 9 and 18 Yule Lads.
• Jón Gunnar Þorsteinsson, answer on the Yule Lads' names, Vísindavefur, December 16, 2022. The 1862 names and the 1932 changes.
• Gróa Finnsdóttir and Árni Björnsson, answer on the Yule Lads, Vísindavefur, 2005, updated 2020. The shoe in the window.
• National Museum of Iceland, "The Yule Lads visit the museum". Names, English names and arrival dates.
• "Anordning om Hustugt paa Island," June 3, 1746, in Lovsamling for Island, vol. 2. The ban on frightening children with the Yule Lad.
• Emily Zarka, "The Wicked Feline Murder Floof: A Yule Cat Story", Monstrum, PBS, December 20, 2019. Árni Björnsson on how little is known before the folk tale collection.
• Visit Reykjavík, "The illuminaton of the Yule Cat" (title spelled so on the site). The autumn wool work and the food-only variant.
• Visit Iceland, "How to avoid getting tricked, or eaten, by Iceland's Christmas trolls". A modern telling of Grýla's sack, cave and cauldron.
• City of Reykjavík, "The Yule Cat". The pet relationship as a common modern claim, and the Lækjartorg sculpture.
• City of Reykjavík, "Jólakötturinn kominn á Lækjartorg", November 14, 2025. The Lækjartorg installation since 2018.