YULE

We know as Yule or Yuletide the celebrations in celebration of the winter solstice that took place in the pagan Germanic peoples, among them the Vikings. In Old Norse it was known as júl o jól and it was a pre-Christian festival that lasted about twelve days; a party dedicated to the family, to relatives and absent friends as well as to fertility and that coincided with the winter solstice, around December 21st. We do not know exactly the dates between which it oscillated; for the Vikings this festival of almost two weeks would probably have been within two months of its calendar that corresponded to the end of the year, from the middle of November to the middle of January. It is a celebration that is lost in the dawn of time since the oldest historical references around this word are found in the primitive Germanic names that designated the months; Jéola, which meant "before Yule" and Aeftera Jéola, which meant "after Yule". In Old Norse it seems that ýlir would have referred to this period of time and that jól would have been the concrete event according to what we can read in the Skáldskaparmal. Gothic or Old English also share these characteristics. It is not an exclusive party of the Vikings, with its variants many pagan societies have dedicated celebrations to the changes of season as nature and the men and women in the pagan world formed an unbreakable bond. The men imitated what they saw. They loved him and feared him. They respected him and honored him. And within these changes Yule is light and fertility, it is the new beginning of life. The importance of the solstices in the northern countries is indisputable because they are countries where people live long periods of time under the mantle of darkness and where the sun makes fleeting appearances and especially at that moment, in those twelve days around the winter solstice, when the sun is most hidden, when the night is deepest and darkest, before sun begins to be seen a little longer and make the days a little longer.