Grýla

Lore & Background

The name Grýla appears in a 13th-century list of heiti for troll-women in the Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson. A 14th-century manuscript of the Prose Edda gives a list of Grýlu heiti that includes terms for foxes, suggesting an association with the Arctic fox. Poems naming Grýla are known from both Iceland and the Faroe Islands, with the oldest belonging to oral tradition. Terry Gunnell hypothesizes that Grýla may once have been associated with disguise and mumming traditions in Iceland, though such practices have not survived. Notably, no explicit mention of Grýla's gender is made in the earliest sources, and some counterparts identified by Gunnell are male; one 17th-century poem describes her as a hermaphrodite.

Reader's Guide

Grýla's significance lies in her evolution from a possibly gender-ambiguous figure in medieval poetry to a clearly female, child-eating ogress in 17th-century Christmas folklore. The oldest extant source linking her to Christmas is the poem Grýlukvæði (c. 1638–1644), co-composed by Rev. Guðmundur Erlendsson and Ásgrímur Magnússon. Later poems introduced her husband Leppalúði. In modern popular culture, Grýla's most monstrous traits are often toned down for younger audiences, and she appears in Netflix's Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, the 2024 film Red One, the series Hilda, and the 2022 video game God of War: Ragnarök. The Yule cat has been depicted as her pet since the 20th century.

Did You Know?

• One 17th-century poem describes Grýla as a hermaphrodite.
• The oldest extant source connecting Grýla with Christmas is the poem Grýlukvæði, dated to around 1638–1644.
• In the 2024 film Red One, Grýla is portrayed by Kiernan Shipka and can shapeshift into her mythological ogre form.

Ancient Roots and Shifting Identity

In the thirteenth century, the Icelandic skald Snorri Sturluson included the name Grýla among a catalogue of kennings for troll-women in his Prose Edda. Yet the figure's earliest identity is far murkier than later tradition suggests. A fourteenth-century manuscript of the Edda lists synonyms for Grýla that are, in fact, words for foxes, hinting at a possible link to the Arctic fox that roams Iceland's tundra. Poems invoking her name survive from both Iceland and the Faroe Islands, most of them products of an oral tradition that predates any written record. Scholar Terry Gunnell has proposed that Grýla may once have been woven into North Atlantic mumming and disguise customs, though no such Icelandic practice has survived into the modern era. Strikingly, none of these early sources pin down her sex. Not every parallel figure Gunnell identifies is female, and one seventeenth-century verse even calls her a hermaphrodite wandering between farms in midsummer rather than at Yule. This suggests the monster we know today was, in her oldest guise, something considerably less defined.

The Seventeenth-Century Poetic Canon

The first unambiguous pairing of Grýla with a female identity and the Christmas season arrives in the mid-seventeenth century. The poem Grýlukvæði, likely co-authored by the Reverend Guðmundur Erlendsson of Fell in Sléttuhlíð and his brother-in-law, the farmer and rímur-poet Ásgrímur Magnússon, can be placed between roughly 1638 and 1644. A decade later, around 1648 or 1649, the Reverend Hallgrímur Pétursson penned Leppalúðakvæði, a work that introduces Grýla's lazy and ill-tempered spouse, Leppalúði, who announces that his wife has been left bedridden following her trek to Sléttuhlíð. The poet Stefán Ólafsson of Vallanes, active between approximately 1618 and 1688, contributed yet another Grýlukvæði to the growing body of verse. Across these texts, Grýla is painted as a grotesque, insatiably hungry troll-woman who drifts from farmstead to farmstead, extorting alms from the villagers she meets and frequently demanding that they hand over their misbehaving children as payment. This literary cluster effectively locked in the crone archetype that would dominate every subsequent telling of the legend.

From Monster to Mother: The Christmas Transformation

By the twentieth century, the fearsome wilderness ogre of medieval verse had been substantially reimagined. Modern Icelandic folklore now foregrounds Grýla's role as the mother of the Yule Lads, the mischievous jólasveinar who deliver gifts in the weeks before Christmas. The Yule cat, a creature that devours those who lack new woolen clothing by Yule, was added to her household as a pet during the same modernizing period. The most terrifying facets of her older persona—above all her appetite for human children—have been deliberately softened in versions aimed at young audiences, so that the monster who once terrorized farmsteads now reads more as a stern, if formidable, grandmother figure. The animated series Hilda offers a telling example of this gentler reinterpretation: in her eponymous episode, the Yule Lads ultimately satisfy Grýla's hunger by serving her a pot of vegetable soup rather than any human flesh. This trajectory from child-devouring ogress to holiday matriarch illustrates how Icelandic culture has continually negotiated the boundary between preserving an ancient myth and making it palatable for successive generations of children.

Grýla in Contemporary Screen and Game

Grýla's mythological profile has made her a natural fixture in modern entertainment. In the Netflix series Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, she appears as a recurring witch played first by Heather Doerksen in parts one and three and later by Samantha Coughlan in part four. The character initially shows up to collect her invisible children, wreaking chaos in the process, before ultimately joining the protagonists' coven of outcast witches. The 2024 Christmas action-comedy Red One casts Kiernan Shipka as the film's central antagonist, a Christmas witch wielding magical powers that include the ability to shapeshift into her mythological ogre form, a transformation voiced by Morla Gorrondona. In the 2022 video game God of War: Ragnarök, Grýla occupies a genealogical role as the grandmother of the serpent-kin Angrboða, linking her to Norse mythological lineage. Together these appearances demonstrate how a figure rooted in Icelandic oral tradition has been transplanted into global pop culture, each adaptation selecting and emphasizing different facets of her character to suit its narrative needs.