Seasons in the Literatures of the Medieval North by Paul S. Langeslag (review)

"Seasons" in Paul Langeslag's title refers to winter and summer, the two traditional seasons of Germanic regions; "literatures" refers to vernacular texts in English and Norse; and "medieval north" refers mainly to Anglo-Saxon England and to Iceland in the time of the Commonwealth, from which these literatures originate. Langeslag's book argues for "a paradigm of soft solar determinism" (p. 61) in northern cultures, by which seasonal extremes in daylight hours, temperature, and weather influence social, economic, and agricultural practices that are variously reflected in literature. Seasonality may operate literally as an aspect of plot, as for example in the Icelandic sagas, where winter is a time of feasting and often of supernatural hauntings, and where summer is a time for farming on land and traveling at sea. Seasonality may also metonymically describe psychological states at any time of year, as when the Old English elegies correlate exile with cold and dark. It may also take the form of what Langeslag calls "seasonal othering"—identifying undesirables such as sorcerers and monsters with winter, or associating fairies with summer.

Langeslag's study depends on the theoretical concepts of psycho-geography (symbolically significant landscape) and the chronotope (the "conceptual integration of time and space" [p. 3]) in literary narrative. Although he delays using these terms until the beginning of Chapter 3, Langeslag's Introduction in effect frames the book with them by characterizing the natural and cultural landscapes of medieval Iceland and England through their geography, climate, archeological remains, agricultural and economic practices, and political and social history. Crucial to his study is the recognition that among northern peoples, the ancient bipartite calendar continued alongside the quadripartite calendar, although Langeslag sees this as a heuristic convenience, mere binary thinking—not, for instance, the by-product of heightened anxiety about winter in a time when the "medieval warm period" was yielding to the "little ice age."

Chapter 1, "Myth and Ritual," contrasts seasonality in Christian and Scandinavian (pagan) cosmologies and calendars. As he does throughout this book, Langeslag works comfortably with texts from both religious cultures, ranging through the Bible, commentary, Latin and vernacular texts, and Norse myth; and reading Old English poems such as Christ and Satan, Genesis B, and Phoenix alongside Norse texts such as Sólarljóð, Vafþrúðnismál, Vǫluspá, Hyndluljóð, and Orkneyinga saga. In both literatures, summer was for agriculture and at times warfare, while winter was for feasting on the year's harvest; in Icelandic sagas, however, winter feasts have a way of devolving into conflicts that erupt into violence in the coming summer, a point underscored with examples from family sagas such as Brennu-Njáls saga.

Chapter 2, "Winter Mindscapes," explores associative evocations of winter that express the psycho-geography of northern cultures. Richly extending the familiar association of harsh winter environments and social isolation in The Wife's Lament and The Wanderer via readings of The Ruin and Bede's famous sparrow simile in the Ecclesiastical History, Langeslag develops a paradigm of the winter environment as a dangerous nonhuman space. Using The Seafarer's imagery of ice-cold sea (l. 14) to bridge actual with figurative environments, Langeslag argues that in Old English, "the widespread poetic convention of describing waterscapes as cold, aided by the water's association with winter weather" in the elegies and in Beowulf "leads to an understanding of the sea as a setting of permanent winter" (p. 86). Thus, the poets of Andreas and Exodus can describe the sea as cold even though their sources do not. These associations operate independently of the time of year: they describe the monsters in Beowulf, including the dragon, and they explain Beowulf's characterization of Scyld Scefing's funeral barge as "isig" (l. 33)—a rather neat solution to an old crux. This chapter makes good use of its limited focus on the giants in Norse myth and the Sami (Finns) in the Grág...