Yule Lads

Also Known As: Icelandic Jólasveinar, singular jólasveinn, roughly “Yule swains”; sons of Grýla and Leppalúði
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Icelandic Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: Thirteen troll brothers who come down from the mountains one a night through Advent, each fixed to a single theft or torment named in his own name.
Role in Mythos: They are the household nuisance arm of Grýla’s family, working the farm and the larder while their mother hunts children outdoors.
Relation to Humans: For most of their recorded history they were used to frighten Icelandic children into obedience, so effectively that the practice was banned by public decree in 1746. Since the twentieth century they leave small gifts in shoes set on windowsills, and a rotten potato for children who have misbehaved.

On the twelfth night before Christmas the first of them comes down off the mountain, and if the ewes start up bleating in the black of the fold, that is him. Stekkjastaur wants milk straight from the animals. His legs will not bend to let him kneel, so he stands over them stiff as a fence post and gets very little for his trouble, and the noise wakes the farm anyway.

The next night his brother arrives, and the night after that another, until thirteen of them are loose in the district at once. Each stays thirteen days and leaves in the order he came, so the last of them walks back up into the snow on the sixth of January and the country is finally rid of them. They are the sons of Grýla, the ogress who boils disobedient children, and of her third husband Leppalúði, who is lazy and rarely leaves the cave. The household also keeps a cat.

Their names are job descriptions. Giljagaur hides in the gullies until the cowshed is empty, then skims the froth off the milk pails. Stúfur is short and works the frying pan. Þvörusleikir takes the wooden stirring stick, Pottasleikir the crust burnt onto the bottom of an unwashed pot, Askasleikir the lidded wooden bowl a person is careless enough to set down on the floor. Skyrgámur goes into the pantry and eats skyr out of the barrel with both hands. Bjúgnakrækir takes sausages from the smoke. Hurðaskellir does not steal at all. He slams doors all night for the pleasure of it.

The oldest written trace of them is late, and thinner than the modern noise around them suggests. The word jólasveinar first appears in a seventeenth-century Grýla poem attributed to the Reverend Stefán Ólafsson of Vallanes, always in the plural, where they are the children Grýla and Leppalúði had together, giants in height, and the whole ill-natured clan is called dangerous to small children. Not one of them is named. A count first appears in an eighteenth-century manuscript of a different Grýla poem, which sets the number at thirteen. Everything else waited until 1862, when Jón Árnason published his collection of Icelandic folktales and printed the numbers nine and thirteen side by side, along with the first list of names: Stekkjarstaur, Giljagaur, Stúfur, Þvörusleikir, Pottasleikir, Askasleikir, Faldafeykir, Skyrgámur, Bjúgnakrækir, Gluggagægir, Gáttaþefur, Ketkrókur, Kertasníkir.

That list is not the only one. Collecting since then, much of it through the folklife department of the National Museum, has turned up seventy-eight recorded Yule Lad names from around the country, five of them female. There were Yule Lads who licked the byre floor, Yule Lads who swallowed smoke, Yule Lads who begged for doughnuts, Yule Lads called simply Red, or Fox, or Steingrímur. Some regions made them Grýla’s brothers rather than her sons. One eastern tradition brought them out of the sea instead of the mountains.

What they were for is not in doubt. Adults used them, and used Grýla behind them, to terrify children into behaving through the darkest weeks of the year, and it worked far too well. In 1746 a public decree ordered the practice stopped, declaring that the foolish custom of scaring children with Yule Lads and ghosts, practised here and there about the country, was to be abolished. It is one of the earliest laws anywhere aimed at a child’s peace of mind.

Nobody wrote down their faces. The record gives height, and then one trait per brother, and stops: Gáttaþefur has an enormous nose and follows the smell of laufabrauð and cake through the walls of a house; Stúfur is unusually small; Þvörusleikir is thin to the point of starvation. The tall figures in ragged homespun that every Icelander now pictures were drawn by Tryggvi Magnússon in 1932 to illustrate a poem, and the red suits some of them wear at children’s parties came later still, off a Coca-Cola advertisement. It is worth being plain about this. Almost every visual detail of the modern Yule Lad postdates the invention of the postcard.

Their real power is access. They get in. Down the smoke hole on Þorláksmessa comes a long staff with an iron hook on the end, groping in the warm dark for the leg of smoked lamb hanging in the rafters or the meat boiling in the pot, and that is Ketkrókur, who never has to show his face to be fed. Kertasníkir arrives on Christmas Eve for the tallow candles, which in a turf house were the brightest light anyone owned and precious enough that a child’s own candle was the best gift of the year. He eats them.

Their limits follow from the same design. Each brother wants one thing and will not deviate, which makes him predictable, and a household that scrubs its pots, hangs its bowls up and shuts its meat away has already beaten most of them. They take only what is left lying out. The calendar holds them too: they come on a fixed night and leave on a fixed night, and no story has one of them stay. The greatest limit of all was imposed from outside. Jóhannes úr Kötlum published his verses about them in 1932, the poem became the version every Icelandic child learned, radio carried it into the Christmas broadcasts, and the brothers were gradually rewritten as mischief-makers rather than menaces. The shoe on the windowsill came in the same way, brought home by Icelandic sailors working the North Sea ports before 1930 and only general around 1960, at which point the National Museum and the radio had to step in to agree whose night was whose. Thirteen child-frighteners out of a seventeenth-century verse now leave sweets in footwear. The rotten potato is all that survives of the teeth.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are the Yule Lads?

The Yule Lads, or Jólasveinar, are thirteen troll brothers from Icelandic folklore, the sons of the ogress Grýla and her husband Leppalúði. They come down from the mountains one at a time on the thirteen nights before Christmas, each committing the specific theft or nuisance his name describes. Each stays thirteen days, so the last of them leaves on 6 January.

What are the names of the 13 Yule Lads?

The thirteen names first printed by Jón Árnason in 1862 are Stekkjarstaur, Giljagaur, Stúfur, Þvörusleikir, Pottasleikir, Askasleikir, Faldafeykir, Skyrgámur, Bjúgnakrækir, Gluggagægir, Gáttaþefur, Ketkrókur and Kertasníkir. The modern canonical list is almost identical, with Hurðaskellir the door-slammer in place of Faldafeykir. Seventy-eight Yule Lad names have been recorded in Iceland altogether, five of them female.

Are the Yule Lads evil?

They were, in the sense that adults deliberately used them to terrify children into obedience, and their mother Grýla eats children outright. The practice frightened Icelandic children so badly that a public decree in 1746 ordered it stopped. The friendlier gift-leaving version of the Yule Lads dates from the twentieth century.

Why do Icelandic children put a shoe in the window?

Children leave a shoe on the windowsill so that each Yule Lad can leave a small present in it overnight, or a rotten potato if the child has behaved badly. The custom is recent: Icelandic sailors picked it up in North Sea ports before 1930, and it did not become general in Iceland until around 1960.

Is Grýla the mother of the Yule Lads?

Yes. The oldest surviving mention of the Yule Lads, a seventeenth-century Grýla poem attributed to the Reverend Stefán Ólafsson of Vallanes, introduces them as the children of Grýla and Leppalúði. Some regional traditions instead made them her brothers, and the number of her children in folklore runs far past thirteen.