Caput apri defero,

cum ingenti priapo.

 

The Yule-analogous holiday of Terry Pratchett's Discworld is, of course, Hogswatch.

And the—really, what else can one call him?—patronal god of Hogswatch is, of course, the Hogfather.

Like the wild boar that he originally was, the Hogfather (of the BBC series, anyway) wears tusks.

In Norse, one might say: Hogfather = Frey. Tusk-Frey, one might kenningly call him.

The swine is one of the preeminently sacred animals of Northern Europe. The pig is still a prime symbol of the Scandinavian Jul. No Yule-board is complete without pork in various iterations; whoever finds the almond in the risengrot gets a marzipan pig; pig ornaments hang on Yule-trees.

The pig is preeminently the sacrificial animal of the North as well. Other domestic animals eat things that we can't and provide other things besides meat: milk, wool, transportation, draft. Swine, however, eat what we eat and provide only meat. That makes them luxury animals, and draws a bond of close kinship between us. They say that human flesh tastes like pork. "Long pig," anyone?

Frey's sacred animal in Norse lore was, of course, the boar. You'd offer a boar to Frey—boar's head, anyone?—at Yule to pray for peace and good harvest (til friðar ok ars) in the year to come.

Now, some have attempted latterly (and controversially) to calque Frey with the Horned God of contemporary witches. Admittedly, there's little association (other than the most general) between Frey and horned animals in the lore.

But perhaps this is to draw the line too finely. As the Horned wears the horns of different species—stag, ram, bull, goat—so too may he also wear the tusks of the boar.

As the god of all animals, not just horned ones, he is as rightly accounted the Tusked God as the Horned.

Biologically speaking, tusks are analogous to horns. In fact, they first developed even earlier than horns did. The first deer had tusks rather than antlers. There's an Asian variety of deer that still has both tusks and antlers to this day.

In the name of the Great Boar, Lord of Wealth and Fruitfulness, I wish you and yours a fine, frithful Yule, now in its Tenth Day.

And (of course) Happy Hogswatch.

 

The epigraph above melds the chorus of the 16th century English Boar's Head Carol with the 11th-century historian Adam of Bremen's description of the statue of Frey at the great temple of Uppsala. It means: The boar's head I bear, with an immense 'priapus' [i.e. phallus].