Even thirty years ago, the word
Yule
would not have been completely foreign to English-speaking ears.
After all, we've used the word Yuletide
to refer to the Christmas period for some time. Indeed, the cognate
jul exists as a modern
word in the Scandinavian languages to refer to the Christian holiday
of Christmas.
These days it's
not unusual for people to be aware of the pre-Christian roots of the
word, referring to a midwinter festival or holiday in the Germanic
world. The exact practices among Germanic pre-Christians varied;
while their languages and cultures, and indeed religion, shared
common roots and themes, there was considerable cultural variation.
We know, or at least think we know, of the dísablót
and álfablót of the
Norse, the public and private sacrifices that took place (as best we
can tell, in some periods and some places) around the shortest day of
the year, the winter solstice. The first honoured, perhaps placated,
the dísir, a range of
female spirits and gods, and the Valkyries; the latter the elves,
mythic and folkloric figures attributed a great range of impacts of
daily life. As the names suggest, each of these was a blót,
an act of ritual worship generally involving a sacrifice, generally
of an animal (though the similarity of “blót” and “blood” is
generally understood to be coincidental). Some sources and evidence
indicate that there was also human sacrifice, though evidence that is
not questionable generally points to this being exceptional, and
generally associated with war.
So far, so much
interesting (if hideously simplified for brevity) history. What does
it have to do with the world (or society) today, and especially what
does it have to do with Quakers? We are not, after all, Germanic
pre-Christians.
