Grýla and the Yule Cat: The Christmas Monsters of Iceland
Most of Christendom spent the last two centuries sweetening its midwinter until nothing was left in the stocking but sugar. Iceland declined. Alone in the western world, the Icelanders carried into the age of fairy lights a Christmas still equipped with its full original apparatus of terror—a holiday with teeth —and its presiding figure is one of the most formidable ogresses in European tradition. Grýla lives in the mountains—in the Dimmuborgir lava fields, says the modern consensus—and at Yule she comes down. She is huge, ancient, and hideous, hoofed and horned in the old rhymes, with (the poems audit her anatomy variously) thirteen tails, three hundred heads or merely an enormous one, eyes in the back of her skull, and ears that hang to her shoulders and can hear children misbehaving across the whole of Iceland. Her sack is for the children themselves: the naughty, the disrespectful, the whiners—gathered farm by farm and carried home to the cave, where the old poems are perfectly e...