Returning to Yule

A reader, as I mentioned in one of the most recent posts, called my attention to the 1853 book The Two Babylons by the Reverend Alexander Hislop. The book, which has been reprinted many times since the middle of the nineteenth century and is still easily available, contains an original etymology of the word Yule (and this is why the comment was written). I have now read Chapter 3 “The Festivals.” Among other things, it deals with Yule. Hislop’s suggestion was new to me, because no linguistic sources mention it. His etymology of Yule is, most probably, indefensible, but ignoring it would be a mistake. In etymological research, wrong hypotheses should be refuted, rather than ignored. I’ll repeat this maxim at the end of the essay.

Chapter 3 begins with a reasonable idea that, given the description in the Gospels, Jesus could not be born on the 25th of December, because the shepherds of Judea were unlikely to watch their flocks in the open fields later than the end of October. I suspect that in the numerous critiques of the biblical text, similar doubts have been voiced more than once. Of course, here Hislop makes an obvious leap: Jesus could indeed be born on the day indicated. It is only the connection with the story of the shepherds that may not inspire confidence. In a broader context, this is a famous problem: if something in the Gospels is wrong, then anything can be wrong. Theology is not my area. I’ll only mention the fact that Hislop referred to several of his predecessors who had the same doubts about the date.

Also, at the time of Christ’s birth, every woman and child, we are told, was to go to be taxed at the city to which they belonged, but, Hislop says, the middle of winter was not fitting for this business. Finally, according to the book, no such festival as Christmas was ever heard of till the third century. Hislop wrote: “Long before the fourth century, and long before the Chistian era itself, a festival was celebrated among the heathen, at that precise time of the year, in honour of the birth of the son of the Babylonian queen of heaven, and it may fairly be presumed that in order to conciliate the heathen and to swell the number of the nominal adherents of Christianity, the same festival was adopted by the Roman Church, giving it only the name of Christ.” Let us remember that the book was directed against Catholicism. Therefore, Hislop spared no arrows for his target. Also, the indebtedness of Christianity to pre-Christian beliefs is one of the most often discussed points of comparative religion. In a similar context, the name of some obscure female divinity also occurs in the book by the Venerable Bede (see the post on jolly Yule).

Hislop wrote that Christmas had originally been a pagan festival. This statement will again not surprise anyone: a new year is born, and the deity is supposed to be born on the same day, to mark the event. And here we are approaching the place for whose sake this short essay has been written: “The very name by which Christmas is popularly known among ourselves—Yule-day—proves at once its pagan and Babylonian origin. ‘Yule’ is the Chaldee name of an ‘infant’ or ’little child’; and the 25^th of December was called by our Pagan Anglo-Saxon ancestors ‘Yule-day’ or the ‘Child‘s day’, and the night that precedes it, ‘Mother-night’, long before they came in contact with Christianity, that sufficiently proves its real character” (pp. 94-95). Hislop cites Chaldee Eöl “infant, little child.”

Chaldee takes us to southern Babylonia (now southern Iraq), and indeed, some parts of the Old Testament were written in Chaldean Aramaic. Not being a specialist, I cannot comment on the form Eöl, because I know only Hebrew yeled and olel ~ olal “infant, little child.” (Yeled has been more than once incautiously cited as the etymon of English lad.) Eöl does not look familiar, but even if this form is correct, Hislop’s etymology carries no conviction.

Let me repeat the basic facts. Yule is not an isolated English noun. The oldest English forms were geohhol and gehhol (g had the value of Modern English y, as in yes). Old Norse (Icelandic) jól, and Finnish juhla, borrowed from Scandinavian, prove that the word once had h in the middle. When that h was lost, the preceding vowel became long. The unrecorded protoform is a matter of reconstruction, but it probably sounded approximately like jehwla, that is, yehwla. If the form Eöl existed and had been borrowed, Germanic speakers would hardly have maimed it into jehwala, jeohol, or something similar. Hislop’s idea has, I think, a rather simple explanation.

When close to the beginning of the seventeenth century, European etymologists began their guessing game, they believed that the words of their languages were the continuations of words in either Hebrew, Greek, or Latin and suggested corresponding sources. To be sure, in 1832, a good deal was known about the origin of the Germanic languages, but though comparative philology had made great progress in Germany, it took a long time before it had reached Great Britain. Hislop, a Scotsman, was not a philologist and despite his erudition and proficiency in the languages of the Bible had probably never heard about Jacob Grimm’s contributions to historical linguistics. His first impulse must have been to trace an English word to Hebrew. I may add that he, who in other cases supplied his theses with numerous references, offered no discussion of the Chaldee derivation of Yule, as though it was self-evident.

That Yule is a pagan festival needs no proof and has always been known. For example, in Scandinavia, Yule was celebrated in “midwinter,” on the twelfth of January. King Haakon the Good, who reigned in Norway from 935 to 960, spent his childhood and youth in Britain (he was King Athelstan’s foster child) and returned to Norway as an observing Christian but had to make all kinds of concessions to the earls, in order to retain the throne. Therefore, in Norway, he lived as a pagan, but at least he decreed that the celebration of Yule be moved to December 25^th. Today, Yule and Christmas are inseparable.

Was it worth writing a post to debunk an etymology that is almost two centuries old? Obviously, if I did not think so, I would not have written it. Our correspondent knew Hislop’s idea but added that not everybody agrees with it. Apparently, Hislop’s suggestion is still current in some circles, even though dictionaries have either never heard about it or don’t (didn’t) think it worthy of refutation. Well, I have done all I could to refute it. And a last remark. The lifeblood of every blog is the readers’ questions and comments. I don’t receive enough of either, and this fact is to be regretted. Only when I make a stupid mistake, do I realize that everything goes per plan. Please write more. “To whet you blunted purpose,” we have put a picture of a mailbox in the header.

_{Featured image by Erik Mclean via Pexels.}