Adam Gopnik, “Romantic Winter,” from Winter: Five Windows on the Season
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We all know about the great ice age—which has been the subject of animated movies and elementary school classes—the vast one that swept over the planet fifty thousand years ago, but most climate scientists believe, and most historians second this belief, that for reasons still not well understood, a second and smaller and shorter ice age conquered our planet sometime between 1550 and 1850. Whether that cooling was limited to the northern hemisphere or was in fact earth-wide, it is certainly the case that Europe was much colder between 1550 and 1850 than it had been in the 2,000 years before or the 150 since.
And as a consequence, the pre-modern winter scenes—those Bruegel pictures of hunters in the snow, the Dutch pictures of skaters on the ice, all of that world of Netherlandish recreation—are occasional art owed to the tiny period when people were first fully aware that the world had suddenly become very cold. There was, one might say, a kind of false spring of winter art right around the beginning of the seventeenth century. Much of the pre-modern winter material—Shakespeare’s poem in Love’s Labour’s Lost, ‘When icicles hang’ (the one with the great Greasy Joan who doth keel the pot)—comes from that period. And that little ice age persisted, if not at that same extreme of cold, right through the eighteenth century, and even well into the nineteenth, and in that little ice age people expected the world to be very, very cold in winter. (That’s why you always have a white Christmas in eighteenth-century English literature; it’s why, as no longer happens, the canals of Holland froze over.)
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