One Christmas Eve in the late 19th century, the family on the Hovland farm in Hardanger, Norway, was sitting down for a festive dinner. The food was on the table, the candles were lit, and the big wooden mug was full of beer.
Then, suddenly, enormous hands appeared between the logs from which their house was built, tilting one side of the house into the air. In the gap between the logs, they could see giant eyes staring at them, glittering in the candlelight.
The farmer didn’t panic. He immediately knew what the problem was. He grabbed the mug of beer from the table and ran out the door to the burial mound, just beyond the farmyard, and he poured the beer on the roots of the tree growing on top. Before, the family had poured beer on this tree every Christmas Eve before the big dinner—but this year they had skipped it. Clearly, the dweller in the mound had not appreciated being overlooked on the big day.
Holiday Beer, Not an Option
What’s going on with that tale? Well, first of all, the festive time we now call Christmas wasn’t originally a Christian celebration. In Scandinavia, we call it “jul,” which is the same as the English “Yule.” The name is so old that nobody knows what it meant before.
Second, in older times, brewing for Yule was not even remotely optional.
Paragraph 7 of the Gulathing Law from the Viking Age requires farmers to brew beer for Yule. That might sound like a joke, but the law continues by saying that the penalty is three marks of silver, a considerable sum. If the farmers fail to brew for three years running, they lose everything they own and must leave the country. This is a serious law.
But why? Why would a law force people to brew?
The old Norse sagas explain what’s going on. The Norwegian king Håkon the Good grew up in 10th-century England, which was Christian at the time. When he came to Norway, the saga says, “the entire country was pagan.” Håkon then shifted the Yule celebration to coincide with Christmas, and he added the law that everyone must brew for Christmas.
What the law really says is that beer must be brewed “and blessed Christmas night in thanks to Christ and the Virgin Mary.” It’s not about forcing people to brew for Christmas. Instead, it’s about making sure they dedicate the beer to the new gods instead of the old ones.
In other words, when Håkon wanted to Christianize Norway, the first thing he did was change the Yule celebration and the beer culture. This was no coincidence because the two were closely intertwined with each other and with the pagan religion. Even before that law, every farmer was brewing for Yule.
Ale Fit for the Dead
Let’s return, then, to the 19th-century Yule, and that family whose dinner was so rudely interrupted. Today, people look forward to Christmastime as a high point of family togetherness in the dark of winter. Historically, however, it was the most frightening time of year. It wasn’t only the time that the nights were the longest and the coldest. It was also the time when all supernatural forces were thought to be at their strongest.
One thing that the people in Norway feared before Yule was Oskoreia, a wild procession of the spirits of the dead that would race around in the air, often kidnapping people and forcing them to join. Oskoreia could get up to all sorts of mischief—and one of them was to empty the beer in the cellar.
To keep Oskoreia out, it’s important to paint tar crosses on the door to the beer cellar before Yule. One year, a certain man forgot. On Christmas Day, as he came to church, a man came up to him to thank him for his good beer. The first man was confused: “You’ve gotten no beer from me,” he said.
“Oh, yes,” said the second. “Last night while you slept, we drank your beer and filled the cask with horse’s blood.” The man had been kidnapped by Oskoreia and forced to join in their antics.
Back then, the high point of Yule was the big family dinner, made from the best the house could offer. That was one reason why they had to brew. People often think the Christmas beer was a special beer, and it was—but only in that it was usually stronger. Otherwise, the recipe was the same as always.
One reason the Yule fare had to be special was that Yule also was the New Year. At a time when life was precarious, it was important that the New Year turn out well. As the year began, they thought, so it would continue, and that meant a chance for some New Year’s magic. If you save up the best food and then serve it with your strongest beer for Yule, then the New Year should be bountiful.
However, that wasn’t the only reason the food and the ale had to be special. Another is that when the Yule dinner was over, the original Yule custom was very different from what we do today.
After dinner, they’d leave the food and beer on the table and light new candles. They’d put fresh wood on the fire and cover the floor in straw. Then everyone would go to sleep on the straw in the living room, leaving their beds empty. During the night, they believed, their dead ancestors would come back to the house where they’d once lived to enjoy one night of eating, drinking, and sleeping.
That’s also the story behind the dweller in the mound. Almost all farms had burial mounds, and people believed that in the mound lay the farmer who originally cleared the farm. Often, they would know him by name—and, in older times, they would literally worship him with sacrifices of beer. Going to the mound at Yule to pour beer on the grave of the ancestor was an ancient custom, and it was the failure to keep up that sacrifice that had enraged the dweller at Hovland farm.
The dead emerging from burial mounds, prowling the night air, and even coming into the house—there’s a clear theme to the old Yule celebration. Many scholars describe it as a “feast of the dead.” And that is not something specific to Norway—you find the same customs in Denmark, Sweden, Lithuania, and Russia, too, suggesting that this really was the true, original meaning of Yule.
The Best You Can Brew
The celebration itself, the veneration of the dead, and the New Year’s magic all required beer because that was by far the best drink the farmers had. So, Yule was closely tied to beer, and it appears to have been that way from the start.
The oldest Norwegian source that mentions Yule is a poem of praise to King Harald Fairhair, dated to the end of the 9th century. In it, the bard says that if it were up to the king, he would “drink Yule” while out in battle. It sounds as if back then one drank Yule rather than celebrate Christmas, and later sources give much the same impression.
So, finally, what was the beer like?
Well, in the 19th century—at that farm in Hardanger, for example—the Yule beer would’ve been the farmhouse ale from each region, pretty much as we know it today. Back then, of course, they always brewed with homemade malt and farmhouse yeast—kveik, in other words.
But what did King Harald Fairhair drink as he sat—unwillingly, we presume, if he’d rather be in battle—in his hall celebrating Yule?
That’s harder to say for certain. We have no recipes nearly as old as the 9th century, and Viking Age sources say almost nothing about how they brewed beer back then.
However, we can make some deductions. Back then, perhaps the most important distinction would be between those who could afford kettles in which to brew and those who had to use hot stones in the mash. The poem “Hymiskvida”—or “The Lay of Hymir,” from the Poetic Edda, first written down in the 13th century—describes the gods Thor and Týr on a quest to borrow a brewing kettle. So, we know that people definitely did brew in kettles by then. And Harald, being a king, surely must have been able to afford one.
Harald came from western Norway, south of the glacier, and this also provides some clues.
In that area they made malt from barley or oats—but only the poor used oats, so his beer would have been pure barley. The malt then was lightly smoked, generally, mostly with birch or alder wood.
Whether his beer would’ve been hopped is harder to say. Hops have been found in beer as early as the 9th century in Norway, and a king would be wise to the latest in fashion. So, quite possibly he did. He probably also used juniper, which we know was used then, just as it was a millennium later.
As far as process, it’s unlikely that it was a boiled beer at that early stage—we can safely guess that it was a raw ale. We can also suppose the lightly smoked barley malt, infusion mashed, was probably lautered through juniper branches and whole-cone hops. (The knowledge that hops must be boiled for full effect probably was not widespread at this time, and the old way of using herbs was in the lauter tun.) Finally, they would run off the wort, cool it to body temperature, and—I would think—ferment it with kveik.
They don’t brew that type of beer anymore in the southern part of western Norway, where Harald Fairhair lived, but in Hornindal, they make beers that are strikingly similar. And the brewers there still brew for Yule every year.
Further north, in Stjørdal, the locals still brew at least 35,000 liters of farmhouse ale every Yule, by one estimate. There, the beer is still smoky, and the association with Yule is still strong. One local brewer says that during Yule, you must drink so much farmhouse ale that when you wipe your behind it hurts as badly as putting snuff on your eyeball. Heavy drinking is hard on the stomach. Note, however, that he says “must”—it’s not an option.
Nor are the dead forgotten.
In many places across Norway—Stjørdal very much included—the custom on Christmas Eve, before the big dinner, is to light candles at the graves of loved ones. These days, at least, we clear the table after eating.