Jólakötturinn

Also Known As: also Jólaköttur; “the Yule Cat” or “the Christmas Cat”, from jól, “Yule”, and köttur, “cat”
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Icelandic Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: An enormous cat that prowls Iceland in the last days before Christmas and devours anyone who has not been given something new to wear.
Role in Mythos: He is the sanction behind the winter wool-work, the reason a household finished its spinning and knitting before Christmas Eve.
Relation to Humans: He is entirely a threat to people and never a helper, and the only thing that turns him aside is a single new garment, which makes him the one Icelandic monster that can be defeated by generosity. Because a farm’s servants and children depended on their masters for clothing, the cat’s appetite fell hardest on the poorest members of the household.

The wool had to be finished. In the black afternoons of an Icelandic December, when daylight came and went inside a couple of hours and the turf walls held the smell of fish oil and damp fleece, every pair of hands on the farm was carding, spinning and knitting against the calendar. A stocking off the needles before Christmas Eve meant a new garment. A new garment meant safety. What happened to anyone caught without one did not need spelling out, because something the size of a hayrick was already walking the snow outside, and it had no interest in mice.

That much of the Yule Cat is genuinely old. Most of the rest of him is younger than the motor car.

The written record begins in a single paragraph. Jón Árnason’s collection of Icelandic folk and fairy tales, printed in 1862, reports that people could not enjoy the Christmas festivities altogether without anxiety, because a creature called the jólaköttur was on his wanderings. He did no harm to those who had some new thing to put on at Christmas Eve. Those who had nothing new went into the Christmas Cat, and he took them, or at least took their jólarefur, the Christmas portion set aside for every member of the household: meat, dripping, and the rest of it. People counted themselves well out of it if the cat settled for the food. For this reason, Árnason writes, children and servants vied with one another at their work, so as to earn some new piece of clothing from their masters before the feast.

The Icelandic carries a joke that English cannot hold. Fara í means to put a garment on, and it also means to go into. A person with nothing new puts on the Christmas Cat and is swallowed by it in the same three words.

That pun is the whole problem. Árni Björnsson, the folklorist whose eight-hundred-page history of the Icelandic calendar is a standard reference for folklorists there, noticed that the entire nineteenth-century record of the beast rests on Árnason’s paragraph, and that Árnason names no source for it. What Árnason does name, in a footnote borrowed from another collector, is a turn of phrase then current in the north of Iceland: people said that anyone who got no new clothes had clothed the Yule Cat. Speakers questioned about it in the twentieth century were unanimous that the phrase meant the opposite of what the words say, and that it was simply another way of saying you had gone into the cat. Björnsson’s conclusion is blunt. The saying came first. The monster is what a nineteenth-century collector made of it.

Not everyone agrees. Guðmundur Ólafsson, an archaeologist at the National Museum, answered him in the Icelandic Antiquarian Society’s yearbook by pointing out that the silence of old sources proves very little, since ordinary popular culture was almost never written down. Ólafsson set the cat beside the animal companions who travel with Saint Nicholas across northern Europe, the Scandinavian Yule goat among them, and beside the older habit of giving the Devil a black cat’s shape. He noted that Nicholas was a popular saint in Catholic Iceland, with many churches dedicated to him, including the church at Oddi where Sæmundur the Learned served, and around whom Iceland built a whole cycle of tales about outwitting the Devil. Terry Gunnell, who has led folkloristics at the University of Iceland for many years, has drawn the same comparison from a different direction: Icelandic sources describe people dancing in animal skins and animal masks at the vikivaki gatherings held around Christmas, until the church began campaigning against them in the eighteenth century. A man in a cat’s hide, coming through the door at Yule, would leave no manuscript behind him.

Whatever made him, he did not stay at home. The English-speaking north had the same fear with a different animal in it. William Dunbar, writing at the Scottish court in the early sixteenth century, begs the king for the Christmas clothing he is owed, and ends every stanza asking that it never be told in town that he should be a Yule’s yald, a Yule’s jade, a broken-down mare. An editor of Dunbar recorded that in Morayshire around 1780 no woman would leave her work unfinished on Christmas Eve for fear of being Yule’s yaud all the coming year: the stocking off the needles, the flax off the rock, the house put straight before bed. In Banffshire the unlucky one was called Yeel’s Jade; in parts of Aberdeenshire, Yeel-shard. When a philologist wrote to a Banffshire newspaper in 1937 to ask whether anyone still used the expression, he received exactly one reply, from a woman in Portknockie who had last heard it on Christmas Eve, 1918. Shetland had a word of its own, jøl-jager, for the person, particularly the boy, who got nothing new for Christmas. Across the water in Norway, Sunnmøre had a New Year’s Goat that took those who had not had new clothes for the New Year, and Salten had Yule Lads who did the same.

The cat got his body in 1932. Jóhannes úr Kötlum published Jólin koma that year, a book of Christmas poems illustrated by Tryggvi Magnússon, and one of them was about the Yule Cat. It is the poem that fixed him: vast, glaring, his eyes lit and hard to look into, his whiskers like bristles, his back up, his claws appalling, hunting men rather than mice. Iceland has been seeing that cat ever since. Ingibjörg Þorbergs set the poems to music around 1970, Björk recorded the cat’s song in 1987, and generations of schoolchildren have cut his tail out of cardboard.

The poem did not make him anyone’s pet. The Yule Cat has his own verses in the book, separate from Grýla, from Leppalúði, and from their thirteen sons. Sharing a cover was enough. By the middle of the twentieth century he had become the ogress’s animal, padding at her heel while the Yule Lads reformed themselves into harmless country simpletons handing sweets to children. The cat never reformed. In one later telling he is so unruly that only Stúfur, the smallest and most beloved of the brothers, can handle him, and rides him over the countryside.

His powers are few and absolute. He is huge, he is fast over snow, he sees in the dark better than anything looking back at him, and he can empty a farm of both its people and its food in a night. Nothing in the record says he can be fought. Nothing says he can be reasoned with, tracked, trapped, or killed.

What he can be is disarmed, and that is where the whole thing turns over. One new thing to wear, however small, and he passes the door. A monster undone by a pair of socks is not much of a monster. The limit is deliberate, because the cat was never really hunting the idle; he was hunting the unclothed, and on an Icelandic farm the people without new clothes were the servants and the children whose masters had not given them any. In November 2018 Reykjavík raised a five-metre iron cat, strung with lights, in the city’s central square. It was admired for its workmanship, and a city councillor pointed out that a municipality which could afford a monster that eats the badly dressed might look at the families in its own streets who could not afford new clothes for their children. The cat had come round to the thing he was always about.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Jólakötturinn?

Jólakötturinn, the Yule Cat, is a giant cat in Icelandic Christmas folklore that eats people who have not received a new piece of clothing before Christmas Eve. In some versions he settles for eating their Christmas food portion instead. He first appears in print in Jón Árnason’s folktale collection of 1862.

How do you escape the Yule Cat?

You escape Jólakötturinn by having something new to wear at Christmas. A single new garment is enough, and it does not have to be large or fine. The rule meant that Icelandic farm workers raced to finish the autumn wool before Christmas, since new clothes were the reward for getting the work done.

Is the Yule Cat really an ancient Icelandic myth?

Only partly. The folklorist Árni Björnsson argues that the whole beast grew out of a figure of speech about clothing the Yule Cat, which Jón Árnason may have mistaken for a monster in 1862. The archaeologist Guðmundur Ólafsson disagrees and links the cat to the animal companions of Saint Nicholas found across Europe. Either way, the cat most Icelanders picture comes from a poem published in 1932.

Is Jólakötturinn connected to Grýla and the Yule Lads?

He is now, but he was not originally. Jóhannes úr Kötlum’s 1932 book gave the cat his own poem with no link to the ogress Grýla, her husband Leppalúði, or their thirteen sons. The three ended up in the same collection, and by the middle of the twentieth century readers had made the cat their household animal.

What does the Yule Cat look like?

The 1862 account never describes him at all. Every familiar image comes from the 1932 poem, which makes him enormous, with glowing eyes that take courage to meet, bristling whiskers, an arched back, a lashing tail and huge claws on shaggy paws. A five-metre iron version of him has stood in central Reykjavík at Christmas since 2018.