In 1746, the Crown issued a household ordinance for Iceland. It covered the ordinary business of a colonial administration deciding how its subjects ought to live: work, worship, the discipline of servants and children.
Buried in it is a clause about a troll.
The ordinance instructs that the foolish custom practiced here and there about the country, of frightening children with Yule Lads or with ghosts, is to be abolished. Christian VI of Denmark, who ruled Iceland at the time, had been told that Icelandic parents were terrifying their children into obedience with a mountain ogress and her sons, and he decided this was not to continue.
It is one of the earliest instances I know of a state trying to legislate a folk figure out of existence on the grounds that she was too frightening for children. Two hundred and eighty years later, Grýla has a statue at Keflavík airport and her sons have a museum schedule.
The ban failed completely. That is the interesting part, and it is worth being precise about why, because the reason is not “the Icelanders were stubborn,” though they were.
Start with who she is.
Grýla is old, but she is not as old as the tourist copy says. Her name shows up in thirteenth-century Icelandic texts, in Íslendinga saga and in Sverris saga, where the first section of the saga is actually titled Grýla, meaning roughly bugbear or threat, because the section is about a menace. Snorri Sturluson lists her name in the Prose Edda among the names for troll-wives, and that is all he does. No description. Just a name on a list.
For four hundred years after that, she is not a Christmas figure at all. She is a generic ogress, available all year. The oldest poems about her show her as a beggar, going door to door, asking parents to hand over their disobedient children, and she can be turned away by giving her food or by simply chasing her off. She lived in a cottage. Only later does she get pushed out of town and into a cave.
She does not become the mother of the Yule Lads until the seventeenth century, in the Grýlukvæði, the Poem of Grýla. And the Lads themselves are unstable for a long time after that. The number varies by region. Sometimes they are her sons, sometimes her brothers. One eastern Icelandic version has them coming out of the sea instead of down from the mountains. One nursery rhyme has two female ones who steal melted fat by stuffing it up their noses.
By the late eighteenth century a poem settles on thirteen. In 1862, Jón Árnason, who had read the Grimms and set out to do for Iceland what they had done for Germany, publishes the first collection that gives the thirteen their names. In 1932, the poet Jóhannes úr Kötlum publishes Jólin koma, Christmas Is Coming, and the poem in it fixes the Lads in the form every Icelandic child now knows: the names, the order, the personalities, one per night from December 12.
So the tradition the King banned in 1746 was, at that moment, less than a hundred years old as a Christmas custom and had not yet taken its final shape.
He still could not kill it.
Here is what I think happened. The ordinance was aimed at the wrong thing. It banned a method: do not frighten your children with the Lads. It could not touch the reason the method existed.
The reason was that Iceland in 1746 was a place where children died. Not rarely. Cold, hunger, accident, the sea. Farms went weeks without contact. The sun cleared the horizon for a few hours and then quit. Every adult in that house knew the danger was real and knew that a small child cannot be reasoned into caution by an accurate description of hypothermia.
Grýla could do what the accurate description could not. She made the danger a person, gave it a season, and gave the child something to do about it. Be good. Get your shoe on the sill. Do the wool work. Every one of those is an action available to a five year old, and every one of them, not coincidentally, maps onto a behavior that actually helped that child survive the winter.
You cannot repeal that with a household ordinance. You can only replace it, and the King was not offering a replacement. He was offering “use gentler means,” from Copenhagen, to people who had buried children.
What actually changed Grýla was not law. It was that Iceland got warmer, richer, and safer, over two centuries, until the thing she was built to do stopped needing doing. The Lads went soft in the nineteenth century, started leaving gifts instead of taking children, and now put candy in shoes. That is not the King’s victory. That is the danger receding and taking the monster’s job with it.
She is still there, though. She did not get repealed and she did not get outgrown. She got retired, which is a different thing, and retirement can be reversed.
Grýla cannot be killed. She can only be satisfied.
Her chapter is one of twenty-three. The book is out in print on Wednesday.
