If the airless, sultry, stuck summer left you longing for autumn or, indeed, for anything other than never-ending broil, you could do no better than plunge into the Anglo-Saxon year. Here, the seasons are properly seasonal, with wispy autumn smoke, blustery spring mornings and a summer that is lush, green and gently generative. Pride of place, though, goes to winter, a hoary-frosted, iron-earthed season of unyielding chill. Frankly, it is glorious.
Eleanor Parker conjures up this evocative magic from her careful reading of the wealth of weather literature left behind by the poets, sermonisers, scientists and historians of Anglo-Saxon Britain, a period that stretched from 410 to 1066. This means roughly 600 summers and winters to think and write about. Combing the texts of everyone from the anonymous author of Beowulf to the Christian chronicler Bede, Parker paints a glowing picture of an age when the revolving year not only filled up the senses, but intricately marked out time and meaning. Braces of scholars were engaged in computus, the science of deciding just when the new year should begin, and what happened to the solstice in a leap year.
