The Winter Nights (Old Norse vetrnætr) are the full-moon feast of the tenth lunar month, which Bede calls Winterfilleth around 725, a compound of "winter" and "full moon" (Gothic fillith). The month name already carries the feast within it: it falls on the full moon of the Winter-Month and opens the dark half of the year. In the Germanic division of the year into summer and winter, the full moon of the Easter-Month marks the start of summer and the full moon of the Winter-Month marks the Winter Nights. These two full moons each open one of the two great seasons. How this bound lunar calendar works as a whole is set out in the overview article on the Germanic lunar calendar.

A lunar timing, not a fixed date

The Winter Nights hang on the Moon, not on the Gregorian calendar. They fall on the full moon of the Winter-Month, which opens the dark half of the year. Terry Gunnell and Andreas Nordberg agree that this is a lunar autumn timing, not a rigid solar date; Nordberg assigns the feast to the four quarter-points of the Nordic week-year, which lie some weeks after the astronomical solar points. The feast lasted three nights. From the sources Gunnell reconstructs that summer ended on a Wednesday and winter began on the Saturday, three liminal boundary nights, called hinar þriðju veturnóttir in Valla-Ljóts saga. Because the timing hangs on the Moon, there is no date table here: when the Winter Nights fall in a given year is calculated by the Ártala app.

Four overlaid aspects

Among the festivals of the year, the Winter Nights unite the most layers. Four can be read off the sources.

The communal sacrifice. Gísla saga Súrssonar (ch. 10) states that it was common custom to greet "winter around this time with feasts and the winter-beginning sacrifice"; a sacrifice to Freyr is named there too. In Eyrbyggja saga (ch. 37), Snorri the Godi holds an autumn feast with plenty of ale. It was, in Gunnell's words, a "semi-public" feast by invitation: inside the house, with slaughter, but occasionally with outdoor games.

The Dísablót. Several sagas attest a Dísablót at the Winter Nights, a sacrifice to the Dísir, female protective powers of the individual, the family, and the kin. Egils saga (ch. 44) describes a sacrifice to the Dísir at the dark of the moon (niðamyrkr) in autumn; Víga-Glúms saga (ch. 6) names the dísablót explicitly. Most vivid is the Þiðranda þáttr: at the winter-beginning blót, nine women dressed in black appear from the north and nine dressed in white from the south, the old and the new Dísir of the family.

The Álfablót and ancestor cult. Closely related but not the same: in 1018 the skald Sigvatr Þórðarson was turned away at several Swedish farms because the Álfablót was being held there, a private household sacrifice to the Álfar, to which strangers were not admitted. Since Old Norse álfr can also mean "spirit of a dead person," the feast likely included ancestor worship, a finding that ties it to the autumnal remembrance-of-the-dead character of the season.

Weddings and games. Valla-Ljóts saga attests weddings at the Winter Nights, and Gísla saga and Eyrbyggja saga the knattleikr ball games, a bat-and-ball game akin to hurling that drew men from across the district.

Finding and interpretation

Ártala keeps finding and interpretation cleanly apart. Secured finding is the lunar position of the feast, its three nights, and that Dísablót, Álfablót, feasting, weddings, and games are bound to the Winter Nights in the sources. Interpretation, by contrast, is how these layers hang together. Gunnell proposes distinguishing two separate Dísir feasts, which are often conflated: an autumn family sacrifice at the Winter Nights in West Scandinavia and a separate spring feast of the Dísir at Uppsala. And the link between the Winter Nights and the start of the year, for instance via the goddess Tamfana, mentioned by Tacitus (Annals I, 50–51) among the Marsi and read by some as "mistress of time-reckoning," is appealing but not secured: an interpretation, not a certainty. The Saxon autumn feast with rites for the dead, attested by Widukind of Corvey, belongs to this milieu too, without a direct line being drawable.

The Winter Nights today

Those who wish to keep the Winter Nights celebrate them at the full moon of the Winter-Month: honoring the Dísir, ancestors, and Álfar, a communal meal, and, in the spirit of the knattleikr, some movement outdoors. The tale of Thidrandi makes a fitting reading. No one needs to work out the exact date for their own year by hand: the Ártala app determines the full moon of the Winter-Month astronomically and, in its Blót lexicon, gives a source-based description of each feast, separated into finding, reconstruction, and assumption. Ártala is available as a web app, for Android and iOS: artala.jahrzaehler.de.

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