Hertigar was just an ordinary guy from Birka, Sweden, until he became the first person in his village to convert to Christianity in the ninth century. One day, right before a rainstorm, a group of men started making fun of him for being a Christian. Hertigar snapped right back that their gods couldn’t keep the rain away, but his God could. Hertigar and the other men set themselves up on opposite sides of a forest clearing. They all began their chanting. The clouds opened up, and then the pagan sorcerers were utterly drenched while Hertigar stayed completely dry. Divine weather magic works.
However, Hertigar isn’t a saint. So maybe saints can’t be weather-wizards?
But don’t worry! The Middle Ages still had weather-wizards. With the right tools, you can absolutely be one of them. You don’t even have to join a (nonexistent) pagan sect or be (not) killed by Vikings to do it.
You’ll find your most useful tool is a simple cross. You can plant a wooden one on a hillside overlooking your fields to keep away hail. Give this cross a special blessing, and it might even fend off early or late frosts. You can emulate non-saint Hugh of Cluny (d. 1109), who pulled off a Lioba when he made the sign of the cross gesture to drive off a similar storm. A cynic might suggest that early medieval priests stressed the quasi-magical power of the Christian cross in order to teach people the importance of Jesus’s death and resurrection. But who’s counting at harvest time?
You can also draw on the power of the air. Ring bells—church bells are loudest—to silence thunder. Mix in the power of water by sprinkling the bells with holy water, and their sound will push hail back into the clouds. If all you have is your own voice, invoke the power of the angels. Don’t stop at the “good” angels like Gabriel or Michael. Panchihel and his forty-four thousand angel helpers would be a good start.
So indeed, when dark clouds appear on the horizon, just smile contentedly. The Middle Ages had weather-wizards, and you’re one of them.
HOW to SURVIVE in ENDLESS WINTER
The winter of 1510–1511 was brutal. Harsher than any in recent memory, and (as it turned out) worse than any the inhabitants of Brussels would later see. So, in January, they did the only thing they could: they built snowmen.
Specifically, they built more than one hundred of them, all over the city. Saints made out of snow, Greek gods made out of snow, cows made out of snow. The snowman art gallery even inspired the city’s official poet to write about it, and to bring the snowbeings to literary life. For example, the poem’s snowcow poops and farts. Because Middle Ages.
A snownun frozen in the act of seduction was funny, and the snowman defecating in the snow castle of one of Brussels’s enemies was even funnier. But the 1511 snowman festival was more than a morale boost. In calling their collective creation a wonder, not a miracle, the citizens of Brussels emphasized that people had done it—not God. Snow sculptures of naked people having sex represented the human triumph over winter. Bring on the cold and the dark, snowmen said. Winter will never win.
That’s exactly the kind of spunk you’ll need to face a winter that’s going to last forever.
HOW TO ADAPT
The medieval Sámi (you probably know their modern descendants as the Indigenous people of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and northwest Russia) thrived quite well in a place that was entirely winter, thank you very much. They founded settlements that they lived in every winter and only during winters. Even those silly Vikings needed summer. January and February were the times when the Norse depended on the Sámi goods they received from trade or from the forced taxes of early colonialism.
Oh, don’t forget—the medieval Sámi could also deal with places that were summer whenever they were there. And by the late Middle Ages, the Sámi groups along the coastlines had taken up new activities (managed fishing!) that made it easier to stay in one place year-round. The Sámi in interior Scandinavia were still the masters of both eternal summer and eternal winter.
In short, the Sámi were ready for anything.
HOW TO ENJOY
So, the Alps in winter.
You’ve got a choice. Will you pound nails into the bottoms of your boots and your mare’s horseshoes? Or will you make like the locals told tourists they did: put a log in the middle of the downhill road, straddle the log and sit, and have someone give you a solid push-off?
Indeed, medieval Europeans knew how to put the wonder in winter wonderland. And the Brussels Museum of Snowmen was just the beginning. Snowball fights in fifteenth-century Germany were apparently so common that priests classified them as a sin. Or perhaps the real problem was that priests were getting smacked in the face with snowballs.
Southern writers seem almost jealous of the Sámi, who strapped skis to their feet, reins to their reindeer, and then enjoyed a little frozen-water skiing. Ice skating, on the other hand, could have been the national sport of the medieval Netherlands if the Netherlands had been a nation at the time. An ice-skating accident even set Lidwina of Schiedam on her journey to sainthood, so don’t worry if you’re a little unsteady at first!
Save up that worry for high medieval Iceland and Scandinavia. Game rules aren’t entirely clear, but most of them involved two teams throwing a ball and chasing each other, with full-body contact. If winter weather got even worse than normal, players sometimes moved their games indoors. They used balls that were weighted to hold up against winter winds, so if you have to play in the hall instead of on a field, be careful about the furniture—especially if it belongs to the queen. Oops. You might have bigger problems, though. The thirteenth-century readers of Egil’s Saga thought it was perfectly realistic for rival teams to start a fight that ended with a player getting an axe in the head.
One hopes that this particular tale grew in the telling.
HOW TO PROFIT
Let the peasants have their balls and axes. If you’re a ruling lord or lady, eternal winter is your chance to come out even further ahead in two key areas.
First, money. The Great Famine of 1315 to 1322 resulted from years of bad harvests in France and the Holy Roman Empire. Peasant families watched in agony as their children starved to death. Nobles watched grouchily as household after household defaulted on their taxes of wheat and barley in order to eat whatever scraps might help them survive. But don’t worry. The nobility came up with a great new strategy to handle multiple years of bad weather conditions: make farmers pay their tax or rent with money, not crops.
Where the peasants were supposed to get that money if they didn’t have crops to sell elsewhere… well, that was their problem, wasn’t it?
Second, status. Fur is the obvious solution to the problem of staying warm, even if it’s a little bit expensive. So why don’t you—or parliament, or the city council—pass laws regulating who can and can’t wear it? In the late Middle Ages, the sumptuary laws that regulated what social groups could and couldn’t wear what clothing made a big deal out of fur—fur itself, different kinds of fur, different places on your clothing to use fur.
The worse winter gets, the more everyone is going to want fur. There’s no better way to assert your superiority than to control who can wear it. If you handle things right, that “who” can become nobody but you.
HOW TO ADAPT, ENJOY, AND PROFIT
There was one unmistakable advantage to winter for western European peasants in the early Middle Ages: less war. So much less. Kings and lords didn’t campaign with armies they couldn’t maintain, so no one got drafted to fight, and troops weren’t ravaging farmers’ fields, burning their houses, and worse. Vikings headed home from their summer raiding season. Even the Mediterranean coast, hardly known for brutal winters, got a break—the sea itself was much more dangerous during winter, so shoreline raids by pirates dropped off considerably then.
Well… Vikings changed all that. By the mid-ninth century, they’d perfected the art of overwintering: setting up hibernal shop on the islands and river deltas that ringed Europe—Ireland, France, Iberia, southern France, you name it. They adapted their life patterns to th
e new location, enjoyed being somewhat less cold, and profited majestically from being able to plunder booty and enslave victims all year round.
Your minor problem here is that the Vikings eventually realized it was better for them all to stop being Vikings per se and just be the ordinary Norse. Their overwinter raiding strategy (not to mention the entire “Viking” business) was good for a winter, maybe for some winters. But it’s not going to be your best bet for eternal winter.
HOW TO WIN
In the end, though, there’s one group of people in the Middle Ages who knew how to do winter right: monks and nuns. Medieval cloisters set their daily schedules according to sunrise, noon, and sunset. So the monastic day started with a communal prayer at dawn.
In other words, since the winter sun rises later, my friend, you’ll get to sleep in. Every day.
HOW to DEFEAT the BARBARIAN HORDES
Let’s be clear about one thing before we even start. In the world surrounding the medieval Mediterranean, everyone was someone else’s barbarian horde. For the first 580 years of Islam, for example, Arab writers had some nice things to say about Byzantium itself. It was al-Rum, the continuation of ancient Rome’s culture and majesty. But the Greeks as a people were either fierce and treacherous men or lustful and seductive women. (You were expecting something different?)
Then the Crusades happened.
In 1098, western Christians invaded the Near East, and in 1099, they slaughtered the residents of Jerusalem. Suddenly Arab writers had much nicer things to say about the Byzantine Christians. Funny how that works.
Let’s be clear about another thing. No matter who you were, Vikings were never the good guys. Now please don’t tar and feather the Norse overall as “just” Vikings (even if one of their chief exports was tar). The vikingr were a small subset of the Norse during a small subset of the Middle Ages who pirated and raided and burned and murdered and enslaved various peoples—including each other. Sure, the medieval horror of and modern romance with the vikingr has marked the period of 800 to 1050 as the “Viking Age.” It didn’t last longer because Vikings, as such, did not last longer. But southern Scandinavia and Iceland stubbornly insisted on remaining populated.
Besides, barbarian hordes never have culture beyond being tough and seemingly evil yet admirable—and the Norse had plenty of culture! True, Bandamanna Saga is not as catchy a book title as Canterbury Tales or Inferno or Anwar ‘ulwiyy al-ajram fi al-kashf ‘an asrar al-ahram. But the Norse sagas are culturally important enough to give us the word “saga” in the first place, and good enough literature to earn it.
Medieval Scandinavia also produced some excellent art. The interlaced scrollwork and stylized animals more usually called Celtic knotwork are best known from the Irish Book of Kells (early ninth century) and English Lindisfarne Gospels (c. 720). Similar Scandinavian art, however, shows how much they valued the artistic. Oh, you say that Vikings raided and destroyed Lindisfarne Priory in 793, seventy years after the beautiful Gospels? Nobody’s perfect.
Hmm, and come to think of it, the Norse didn’t really get much better after the Viking Age ended. In the high Middle Ages, some Norse lords gradually forced the Sámi people to their north to pay them… let’s call it “protection money.”
So… let’s just stick with “Vikings were never the good guys.”
This is the story of how that worked out for the Vikings, and why it will work out for you.
* * *
Because events in medieval Europe only really matter when they affect England or France, the Viking Age began in 793, when vikingr ravaged the English coast just southeast of Edinburgh to a significant extent for the first time. But the various Scandinavian collectives weren’t messing around. By 820, raiding parties were well into France and pushing down the Seine River toward Paris. By 840, they had made it to Iberia. The terror of writers in France, Christian Spain, and al-Andalus was justified. (By 842, Viking groups were also losing in Iberia, but let’s set that aside. Barbarian hordes aren’t supposed to lose until they lose to you.)
By 900 or so, Norse groups from Norway and Denmark had plundered large swathes of England and France into submission. And suddenly the question became “Who had had enough?” Because in 911 or so, an otherwise-unknown Viking leader named Rollo (c. 860–930) decided to make a deal with Carolingian emperor Charles the Not-Devious (no, really). The treaty apparently gave Rollo… the land he already controlled in exchange for defending it against other attackers.
Subsequent treaties between Rollo’s descendants and Charles’s successors expanded the Vikings’ political control of territory through political means. Part of the deal was even converting to Christianity. Vikings were infamous above all for burning and looting churches and monasteries (possibly because monks and nuns were the ones writing the records), yet Rollo donated money and land to the Church.
It’s not that the Vikings in Normandy became French. (Insofar as you could consider anything in the year 911 to really be “French.”) They imposed some Scandinavian laws on their new subjects, and Norse words filtered into the local vocabulary. So the Norman Vikings were still Vikings. They took, and they took, and they took. Just… they began to prefer doing it through politics and intermarriage, and they began to give as well as take. In short, they were Vikings—but they were no longer vikingr. The barbarian hordes were neither barbarians nor hordes.
So Rollo-ver in your Viking-style burial barrow, Erik the Red. King Charles treated western Europe’s fiercest foes as equals, showed favor to the wrong nobles, died in prison, and was memorialized as Charles the Not-Devious. But you have to admit that giving the barbarian hordes land that you don’t even control and convincing them to adopt your religion is an unorthodox strategy for defeating them.
HOW to OUTWIT a GENIE
So, you’re broke.
Traveling was one of the most expensive things you could do in the Middle Ages (besides spending one-third of France’s gross national product to ransom the king in 1250). You’ve been traveling for a long time now, so you’re broke.
You’ve already grudgingly admitted that heroes don’t steal money for personal benefit. For some reason, too, heroes never take a week or two out of their quest to perform a little bit of honest harvest-season labor as a farmhand. That makes you prime genie-bait.
You know how this story goes. You find a lamp; the lamp is inhabited; the lamp’s ghostly resident offers to grant you any three wishes in the world; the specter finds a way to twist your requests until you end up rich but dead. Unless, of course, you can find a way to make this genie give you what you thought you were asking for.
The Middle Ages should be able to help. Jinn are time-honored spirits of Near Eastern folklore. But the footnote for the familiar wish-granting, lamp-dwelling jinni—and successfully deputizing its powers—cites the story “Ala al-Din, or, the Wonderful Lamp,” one of the (far fewer than 1,001) stories in 1001 Nights. The various stories in the 1001 Nights anthology have roots in cultures stretching back to ancient India, but the large majority of the book is a creation of the early medieval Arabic world.
… Except for “Ala al-Din,” a story that doesn’t show up in copies of 1001 Nights until 1700s France. Now, 1700s France was many things, such as short on bread and dangerous for heads, but it was definitely not medieval.
So if you want to outwit your genie, and keep all the money without losing your life, you’ll need to find your strategies somewhere besides actual medieval stories about jinn.
THE NEED TO SEEK GUIDANCE ELSEWHERE WILL BENEFIT YOU
Consider the genuinely medieval 1001 Nights story “Abu Muhammad hight Lazybones.” Abu Muhammad was a man whose preferred lifestyle earned him the nickname “Lazybones.” Here’s how lazy: when he needed money, he gave what he had to another man to go find something that would make Lazybones a solid profit. The other man’s acquisition was unsurprisingly a jinni in disguise. And in fact, Lazybones did harness the power of the jinni, and the jinni did make him as rich
as the caliph.
Of course, in between asking someone else to do the work to make him rich and actually being rich, the man nicknamed Lazybones had to travel through a desert, kill a brown snake to rescue a white snake, travel to space, fall into the ocean, sail almost to China, visit a mythical city, acquire a magical sword, sneak into the city, climb a pillar, and sprinkle musk on a vulture. Also, he had to make friends with several members of the white snake’s family, and then harness the power of a whole army of jinn. One might rather imagine that the original jinni outwitted no-longer-Lazybones, even if the human ostensibly won.
You’ve already got a dragon to slay and a princess who may or may not let you save her. You don’t have time to star in what was ultimately a religious morality tale about the value of hard work, too.
STRATEGY #1: BYPASS THE GENIE
You don’t have to outwit something you don’t deal with in the first place. So when you find the lamp, just melt it down and sell the gold.
On the other hand, what self-respecting genie ever lived in a big lamp? If you use this strategy, you’ll be alive, but you won’t be rich for long.
STRATEGY #2: PROTECT YOURSELF
When you prepare to negotiate with your genie, first draw a magic circle around yourself and recite incantations to cast a spell of protection from the genie’s wiles.
On the other hand, what self-respecting genie wouldn’t point out that your circle is actually lopsided? And who ever heard of a magic oval?
How to Slay a Dragon Page 12