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The Medieval Winter and Other Seasons - Script

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Winter in Tres Riches Heures, a medieval book of hours - Musée Condé

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Script:

We begin with an excerpt from The Menologium, or rather a menologium, a calendar poem with its days of the months, its saints’ days. We begin as it appears in Eleanor Parker’s book Winters in the World.

“After [All Saints’ Day] comes Winter’s Day, far and wide,

six nights later, and seizes sun-bright autumn

with its army of ice and snow,

fettered with frost by the Lord’s command,

so that the green fields may no longer stay with us,

the ornaments of the earth.”

We are, as I write this and even more as you hear it, well past All Saints’ Day now, the first of November sliding away into the distant fog of the pre-festive season as we enter the new year. However, the world outside my window has not yet been seized by those icy armies of the Old English poem. No frosty fetters hold in captivity its tree limbs and blades of grass. Indeed, the weather is unseasonably warm here as I’m writing, and though that could certainly change any day now, it’s looking very much like another year where I won’t bother dragging out the winter coat, and a couple of pretty light layers are going to comfortably do. But though it might not feel like it just yet, at least not here in Vancouver, it is very firmly winter. You can tell from the lights on the houses, and on the tree across the room from me, which will stay a few days still, from the ever present Christmas music of recent weeks, now departing.

Today’s episode is not really a Christmas one—there’s no talk of Santa Claus or further mentions of Mariah Carey beyond this one—so this is not a slightly delayed holiday special, but it is about winter.

Hello and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the history podcast that, today’s topic aside, generally focuses on the stories of medieval travellers and the histories around them. A history podcast that is supported by a Patreon, where you can listen early, ad-free, and to extra mini-episodes at patreon.com/humancircus, and can do so for as little as a dollar a month or as much as makes sense for you. Thank you, everyone who has done so in 2023, and thank you Oscar Rodriguez for mostly recently coming aboard.

And now, as I generally say at this point, back to the story, except it’s not really a story this time, more of a ramble. A pleasant ramble through winter.

Here where I am, the imagery of winter around me is overwhelmingly that of Christmas, whether its presents, trees, or holiday movies that I’ll likely never see, unless of course they happen to be The Snowman or A Charlie Brown Christmas, each of which I watch once a year. But as Parker notes in her book, and as I think we have touched on in a Patreon post at some point, the season in Old English sources is often associated with something quite different. It’s the imagery of marching armies which conquer the land and hold it captive. They hold it in their icy grip for a time, only surrendering their grasp on it and its people with the coming of spring. So it was in those lines which I read at the opening of this episode, and so it is also in the Old English poem “Andreas.”

In that telling of the acts of St. Andrew, the saint is cast as a kind of heroic warrior, one who hears one day the voice of God and is given a task appropriate to this podcast.

“You must travel,” the voice tells him, “bearing your peace,

seeking out a journey where the self-eaters

defend their domain and hold their homeland

through murder-craft.

…

You must then set out on a journey,

bearing your spirit into the grip of furious men,

where a war-struggle will be offered to you

through the rushing crash of battle,

through the war-craft of warriors.

You must mount a ship at once with the dawn,

even at next morrow, at the seashore—

and on the cold water, burst forth over the bath-way.

Have my blessing across my middle-earth wherever you go!”

At one point in his adventures, Andrew is taken prisoner. A “malignant enemy” holds him, having come with a “measureless host” of “shameful lore-smiths [and] a crowd of shield-bearers.”

“They dragged him, daring-minded and stout-hearted,

across hill-scarps and along rocky slopes—

even as widely as where the old paths were lying,

the work of giants within their cities, streets stone-paved.”

They left him “sodden with sore wounds, bedewed with blood, his bone-house broken,” and in that state he “was beset with cunning wiles the whole night, an earl courage-hard under the gloom-shade,” as he contemplated the wintery storm, described in these words.

“Snow bound the earth

in winter-tumults. The skies grew cold

with hard hail-showers, and ice and frost,

hoary battle-marchers, locked up the homeland of men,

the dwellings of the people. The lands were frozen

with cold and chilly icicles; the forces of the waters was

shrunken.

Across the river-currents ice built a bridge,

a dark sea-road.”

The language of winter’s bonds was often used, Parker says, to illustrate such restraints of a more literal kind, the imprisoned saint beset “the winter-cold night long,” and the land itself held in chains by “cold icicles of rime,” or frost, to use the wording of another translation, that of Aaron Hostetter. And the wording is lovely, magical even, if bleak, with its land and waters locked up by “white war-steppers,” in Hostetter’s version, “hoary battle-marchers” in Parker’s.

Parker points to the Old English original here—“hare hildstapan” I’ll say/guess, with apologies to those with some sense of Old English pronunciation—she points out how the “hare” part, as in the “hoar” of “hoar frost” is also a word for people grey and old, so we get this image of grim and grizzled icy warriors on the march across the land—they only relinquish their winnings of war with the end of their campaigning season, when the people may fully return to life outside and reclaim what is theirs.

If the Old English language around winter is lovely, the experience of it which it tells is often not. It is something not to be enjoyed, but endured. That’s how it is for St. Andrew, and for another prisoner, the heroic smith Weland, who must suffer, his hamstrings cut, through “winter-cold misery” before he can make his escape by crafting magical wings. Winter is a destructive force, as also seen in another source, a poem in which a pagan speaks in riddling verse to a wise king, a bit of a classic set up, and says to him, quote:

“But why does the snow fall, hide the ground,

conceal the shoots of plants, bind up fruits,

crush and repress them, so that they are for a time

shrivelled with cold? Very often too he puts

many wild beasts to the test. He builds a bridge over

the water,

breaks the city-gate, proceeds boldly on,

[and] plunders…”

All of this, winter does, before its deeds are cut short by the loss of that part of the manuscript, before it can tear into the buildings’ walls with icy fingers, burst the doors of homes and steal into the rooms within to pin the folk with hands of frost.

And that is somewhat the tone of how winter has appeared on this podcast too, as a destructive power or a restrictive force. Its coming affected the plans of ibn Fadlan on his way north, and his experience of it was one of hellishly cold temperatures: cheek frozen to pillow in the morning, beard after the bath house quickly becoming a block of ice, trees cracking in the bitter air.

It froze other travellers too, such as Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo, stuck where he was, in Pera, with no ship to be found that would carry him into the Black Sea until the weather had warmed. And in that same series, we talked of how ibn Arabshah had written of Timur readying his men against the “broad swords of ice and sharp spears of cold,” though his preparations for the coming campaign against China, and the weather that would entail, would not be enough.

Those lands in winter “appeared like the plain of the last judgement or a sea which God forged out of silver,” and “when the breath of the wind blew on the breath of man, it quenched his spirit and froze him on his horse.”

“...many perished of his army, noble and base alike, and winter destroyed great and small among them and their noses and ears fell off scorched by cold … and winter ceased not to attack and poured against them wind and seas, until it had submerged them, while they wandered in weakness.”

William the Franciscan, on his way to see Batu Khan, was warned by the man who was to escort him that, quote, “It is a four month journey, and the cold there is so intense that rocks and trees split apart with the frost: see whether you can bear it.” And if he couldn’t, he was informed, then he would be abandoned to death. William and his companion would find the journey every bit as bad as advertised, and when they eventually reached the territory of Mongke Khan, the depiction of winter there was, if anything, even harsher.

Winter held great military campaigns in check, was something to simply be waited out by this crusading army or that, wherever they might find themselves, and was one of the factors that drove Salah ad-Din from Tyre. In the Saga of Grettir the Strong, the season likewise formed a pause in traffic, a period in which to stay where you were, with the ships to and from Norway not expected until spring.

It formed the stage on which Grettir could perform his superhuman feats, swimming the rivers of freezing cold while others huddled powerless where they were. It was also a time when hauntings became most violent and troublesome, the risen dead coming also with the time of Christmas.

Winter, broadly speaking, for the subjects of this podcast, has been something to be avoided.

And all of this talk very much puts me in mind of Adam Gopnik’s Massey Lectures book, Winter: Five Windows on the Season. In it, he writes of how our view of winter shifts as we come to secure ourselves from its effects. “Winter’s persona changes,” he says, “with our perception of safety from it. … The romance of winter is possible only when we have a warm, secure indoors to retreat to, and winter becomes a season to look at as much as one to live through.”

Gopnik’s wintery comforts are of course not enjoyed by all, even in the present, and those Old English sources and the travellers of this podcast were likewise not yet in the “look at” stage. They were closer to directly confronting the “dreary prospects” described, in quite miserable terms, by Samuel Johnson: “The naked hill, the leafless grove // The hoary ground, the frowning skies.” They were a long way removed from William Cowper’s 1783 poem in which he addresses winter itself in very fond terms, concluding with the words:

“I crown thee, [winter], king of intimate delights,

Fireside enjoyments, homeborn happiness,

And all the comforts that the lowly roof

Of undisturb’d retirement, and the hours

Of long uninterrupted evening, know.”

Cowper’s is a very modern winter in a sense, one of coziness, we would now say, but it’s one of idyllic pleasures that feel to me now a little distant from when Cowper wrote to a friend that “there is hardly to be found upon earth … so snug a creature as an Englishman by the fireside in the winter,” if not quite as distant as Weland’s “winter-cold misery.” I suppose it’s just that something of the nature of the “homeborne happiness” has changed since Cowper’s own “undisturb’d retirement,” but the idea of cozy warmth from which to look out at the cold remains, an “us” inside, and an “all that” outside.

There is something of a similar spirit to the 19th-century poem “St. Martin’s Eve” by John Clare. Martinmas, on November 11th, for many marked the beginning of the winter season for many years, and Clare’s opening lines beautifully set the tone for a certain kind of late-autumnal contemplation.

“Now that year grows wearisome with age,” he writes,

“And days grow short and nights excessive long.”

Rude winds, he says, have done the landscape great ill, and “the woods are desolate of song.” The skies are empty, and the only bird call is that of the “lone & melancholy crane // Who like a traveller lost the right road seeks in vain.” The children rush indoors “from threatening rain.” They wish for the sun to make its appearance, but, Clare writes, “Winter’s imprisonment is all begun.”

Yet while all outside is grey and lifeless with the imagery of imprisonment very similar to those medieval sources, inside, in Clare’s poem, there is joy still. For “spite of all the melancholy moods,” quote:

“The fireside evening owns increasing charms

What with the tale and eldern wine that warms

In purple bubbles by the blazing fire

Of simple cots & rude old fashioned farms                                                                             

They feel as blest as joys can well desire                                                                                      

and midnight often joins before the guests retire.”

I grew up in a house with a fireplace, and it’s becoming clearer and clearer in reading for this episode, that the fireplace is something that’s really lacking from my adult experience of winter.

As the poem continues, there are more scenes of warmth and comfort, of apples roasting by the fire—again the fire—and a pitcher of creaming ale warming with nutmeg, which, I honestly don’t know how appealing that is, but I’d be willing to give it a go.

Going back to Gopnik for a moment, I’m interested in the thread of fascination he finds with winter. It’s not just something to hide away from in gentle comfort, but also a source of wonder and awe. It’s the sight that moves Coleridge to write home to his wife that, “But when first the ice fell on the lake, one huge piece of thick transparent glass, O my God! What sublime scenery I have beheld.” It’s the Romantic contemplation of ice-blooms on the windows. And it’s there, that fascination and awe, in some of the older sources too, which we again find in Parker’s book.

“There was a wonder on the wave,” one line reads. “Water turned to bone.” There are fetters of frost in another source, but we also read that “water wears a helmet, wondrously locking up shoots in the earth.” Things are being locked up still, but it’s wondrous this time. “Hail,” in another source, “is the whitest of grains. It whirls down from the air of the sky, // gusts of wind toss it about; afterwards it turns into water.” Destructive and enchaining force is not winter’s characteristic that takes centre stage here, but rather the power of transformation, something necessary and natural, a wonder and a marvel.

So it wasn’t all bleak then.

And that’s good, because I don’t want to end this on a bleak note, this last bit of podcasting for the year 2023. The world of the present seems incredibly grim to me, and without sugar-coating or rose-tinting the past, I do like this podcast to be a bit of a break from that, for me and for you. So I’ll end with one last vision of winter, and there is going to be a medieval connection here, if only a somewhat tenuous one.

It’s a winter album that I grew up with, one that was playing year after year, winter after winter, around the house, and one which I still play now, when in season. It’s called To Drive the Cold Winter Away by Loreena McKennitt, and there is a medieval connection there in the traditional songs it includes, such as the Wexford Carol, but what I’ll read here is not from one of those.

It is instead from 19th-century Canadian poet Archibald Lampman, whose poem “Snow” McKennitt sings on that album, doing so rather more nicely, I have to say, than I’m about to read it, and doing so with some changes to the original poem, the one which I’ll be reading from here.

“White are the far-off plains, and white

The fading forests grow;

The wind dies out along the height,

And denser still the snow,

A gathering weight on roof and tree,

Falls down scarce audibly.

The road before me smooths and fills

Apace, and all about

The fences dwindle, and the hills

Are blotted slowly out;

The naked trees loom spectrally

Into the dim white sky.

The meadows and far-sheeted streams

Lie still without a sound;

Like some soft minister of dreams

The snow-fall hoods me round;

In wood and water, earth and air,

A silence everywhere.”

And that, I think, is a good place to leave our winter ramble, and also the podcast for 2023.

Thank you for joining me this year on the various journeys we took. Thank you for your ears, and your kind attention, and your support. I hope you enjoyed a happy holiday season, in whatever form your celebrations took, and I wish you a happy New Year’s.

I’ll see you back here in 2024, and I’ll talk to you then.