WINTER is coming. The ominous refrain from Game of Thrones, the George R.R. Martin bestseller and hit HBO series, is simple, but thick with cultural association. Our imaginations are drawn strongly towards the dark and cold of winter, even while we may dread the reality.
On the one hand, the prospect of colder days rouses our instinctive survival fears, but on the other, sanitised modern winters offer both a sensory and emotional allurecrackling fires, fuzzy jumpers, hot drinks and festive family celebrations are routinely fetishised. Tapping into this, brands cunningly vie with each other to produce the ne plus ultra of snowy saccharine holiday adverts (see the cosmic take from John Lewis, a British department store, below).
Fictional winters, whether intended to be cosy or unsettling, tend to be terribly dramatic. Snow, ice, storms and squalls are powerful literary devices; drizzle is not. Of these seasonal scene-setters, snow is the most popular, usually to create an atmosphere of wholesome excitement, otherworldliness even. As J.B. Priestley noted: The first fall…is a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of a world and wake up in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment, where is it to be found?
However, for all our romantic notions about snow, it also works to create some of our bleakest literary moments: a perfectly chilling backdrop for death, melancholy, and isolation. As snow is so emotive in modern culture, particularly in our childhood stories, it works powerfully when inverted to become a sinister backdrop.
Donna Tartt used it to great effect to open The Secret History. The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of the situation. We picture a lovely pastoral Spring in the first clause The snow in the mountains was melting, from which we are swiftly removed by the second. Without this setting, the novels openingand, crucially, its endingjust would not work.
James Joyce, like Ms Tartt, used snow’s usual gentleness to paint a haunting picture in The Dead, set in rural Ireland. As with Ms Tartt, we are lulled into a quiet pastoral scene before being disturbed by death:
It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried…His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and dead.
Conversely, it is precisely this isolating, desolate quality that makes winter acts of kindness more poignant and romantic. It sets the scene for devotion, as seen in Margaret Atwood’s Carrying Food Home in Winter:
I walk uphill through the snow
hard going
brown paper bag of groceries
balanced low on my stomach,
heavy, my arms stretching
to hold it turn all tendon.
Do we need this paper bag
my love, do we need this bulk
of peels and cores, do we need
these bottles, these roots
and bits of cardboard
to keep us floating
as on a raft
above the snow I sink through?
The skin creates
islands of warmth
in winter, in summer
islands of coolness.
Ms Atwoods islands of warmth are what make love so intense in the winterwe need more than ever to be embraced and cared for. Winter romance is all about hunkering down and facing the elements as a pair, as in Ms Tartts The Goldfinch. “They were playing old Bob Dylan, more than perfect for narrow Village streets close to Christmas and the snow whirling down in big feathery flakes, the kind of winter where you want to be walking down a city street with your arm around a girl like on the old record cover.
Centuries earlier, Robert Burns expressed the same sentiment in O Wert Thou in The Cauld Blast:
O wert thou in the cauld blast,
On yonder lea, on yonder lea,
My plaidie to the angry airt,
Id shelter thee, Id shelter thee.
Or did misfortunes bitter storms
Around thee blaw, around thee blaw,
Thy bield should be my bosom,
To share it a, to share it a.
Whether walking the streets of 21st-century Manhattan or trekking the wild hills of 18th-century Scotland, the impulse is to protect the one you’re with. In good company we can enjoy winters hostile beauty. And we also take comfort that the promise of spring is always somewhere on the horizon. As Scottish poet Andrew Young wrote in Last Snow, One green spear/Stabbing a dead leaf from below/Kills winter at a blowthe annual life-affirming triumph of life over death, love over loneliness.
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