Yule (Midwinter Blot)

Yule, in the form of the Midwinter Blot, is the great midwinter festival of modern Heathenry (Asatru, the revival of the pre-Christian Norse and Germanic religion), kept around the winter solstice. It looks back to the jol attested in the medieval Icelandic sagas and in Snorri Sturluson's account of the old religion, where Yule was the greatest feast of the heathen year, spanning the darkest part of winter and kept with sacrifice (blot), feasting and heavy drinking in honour of the gods and the ancestors. The medieval sources record offerings made "for a good year and for peace", oaths sworn over sacred objects, and toasts (full) raised over the drinking-horn to Odin, to the departed and to kin.

Modern Heathens reconstruct the festival from these sources, keeping a blot (now typically an offering of food and drink poured out, rather than animal sacrifice), a sumbel (a formal round of toasts and pledges over the horn), and a feast, often renewing bonds with the gods and the ancestors and swearing oaths for the coming year. Fires, evergreens, and the Yule boar and log belong to the season, and many such customs later merged with Christmas, a genuine overlap that modern Heathens both draw on and seek to distinguish from the Christian feast. As a deliberate revival grounded in the textual record, the Midwinter Blot exemplifies the reconstructionist temper of modern Heathenry, which builds its practice from the surviving medieval evidence for the old religion.

Iceland formally recognised Asatru, the modern revival of Norse and Germanic religion whose midwinter Blot this entry describes, as an official state-registered religion in 1973, entitling it to the same tax-funding mechanism available to other recognised faiths, and the Icelandic Asatru association subsequently built Hofid, the country's first purpose-built pagan temple in around a thousand years, with construction beginning in the 2010s, a level of formal civic standing few modern Pagan movements anywhere have achieved.

Heathenry has also had to reckon publicly with attempts by racist and white nationalist groups to claim Norse religious symbolism for their own ideology, a use most major Heathen organisations explicitly and repeatedly reject; a number of prominent Heathen groups internationally have issued formal public statements, including a widely circulated declaration rejecting folkish and racist interpretations of the religion, insisting that devotion to the old Norse gods carries no implication about ancestry or ethnicity, while a smaller number of self-described folkish organisations continue to hold and defend an ethnicity-based view of who may properly practise the religion, making the boundary between inclusive and folkish Heathenry one of the clearest and most actively contested divisions within the modern movement.