Winter

Word of the Week

Snow was the best of all playthings, when I was a boy! We got a lot of it in our part of Pennsylvania, and even after I’d outgrown sledding down one of our steep roads, I still liked to walk a long way into the woods when there was snow on the ground and the air was cold and crisp. When the snow was just a bit granular, and the sun shone on it, you could see the crystals reflect the light back at you in small glints of color, all the colors of the spectrum. I’d stand on a hill the glaciers had tumbled up in heaps of boulders, looking out on my town below, with the smoke coming from the chimneys far away. Winter was a comfortable time, especially since we had a couple of weeks free from school, to celebrate the Christmas holidays and the New Year.

Claude Monet, “The Magpie.” Public Domain.

It wasn’t always so, of course. I’m looking at my dictionary of Old English (that is, English before the Norman Invasion in 1066, a good rough point for dividing Old English from Middle English, heavily influenced by French, because that’s what those descendants of the Vikings from Normandy were speaking). There are 27 words with WINTER in them, and a lot of them suggest that winter was a hard time. So you would tell your age as a WINTERGERIM, a counting-up of WINTERS you had gotten through. The Wanderer in the poem by that name is WINTERCEARIG, that is, WINTRY WITH CARES, because he is alone; the lord who was his kinsman too is dead, and the joys of the lord’s hall, the giving of treasure, passing round the bowls of mead, listening to the poet on his harp, are no more. It’s not surprising that when the Norse thought of the dwelling place of the gods, they didn’t think of a beautiful mountaintop, as the Greeks did with their Mount Olympus, but of Valhalla, literally the “Hall of Men Slaughtered in Battle.” The winter couldn’t touch them there. But if you were still alive on earth, you might need a WINTERSETL: WINTER QUARTERS, or a WINTERHUS, a WINTER-HOUSE, and that suggests a way of life that centered around the care of sheep and goats, because in the summer you’d take them to good foraging places in the hills and the mountains, where you wouldn’t need quite as much in a house to keep out the cold. When did WINTER begin? Well, these were the years before the three centuries of warm weather in Europe and perhaps also all over the world — between 1000 and 1300, the Vikings were farming on the coasts of Greenland. So the old word WINTERFYLLETH was the name for the month we call OCTOBER. And how do you survive a winter? You need to have stored up food, so we have the interesting word WINTERSUFEL, meaning FOOD FOR WINTER. What that referred to specifically, I don’t know. SUFEL was what you’d put on bread, like jam or relish or butter, or what you’d eat along with bread, like cheese or meat. So it was, perhaps, anything at all that you could save up for winter, like smoked or salted meat, or preserved berries and vegetables.

Then there’s the word WINTERRAEDINGBOC, the WINTER READING BOOK, and what would that be? Not The Call of the Wild, set in the far north. Not a book for your own entertainment as you sat beside the fire. It was the book of church readings for the season of winter — the lectionary for Advent, Christmastide, and the time of Epiphany. For our Anglo-Saxon linguistic ancestors were evangelized in the seventh and eighth centuries, and thus they had their WINTERFEORM recognized in law, the CHRISTMAS FEAST. C. S. Lewis had a fine way to describe the gray secular life that seemed to have descended upon modern England: always WINTER, but no CHRISTMAS. Whatever hope there is for the world lies not with WINTER, which will come to all in its form as the cold of death, but in the feast that breaks through that winter, like the evergreen sprigs of the mint I saw on the bare rocks in the woods when I was a boy: the WINTERGREEN. People once used its oil as a medicine. Whether it worked, I can’t say. But the true WINTERGREEN is to be had from the One who lay in a manger, as the carol puts it, “in the bleak midwinter, long ago.”