A heat wave is unpleasant and can be deadly, but low temperatures pose a far greater threat to life. Protection from this danger required humans to mobilize their powers of invention. For generations, winter’s icy embrace posed an enormous challenge. What can people eat when there’s nothing to harvest? How can they keep from freezing to death? And how can they move from one place to another when snow blocks every path and road? Answers to these stark questions represent many of civilization’s grand achievements. Having enough to eat, for example: from drying apples and pears to smoking fish and meat, pickling vegetables, canning plums, and curing bacon, nearly all techniques for preserving food emerged to help adapt to winter. The cold also fueled the development of heating and insulation systems. For vast stretches of time, the common way to heat an indoor space was simply to light an open fire. Stone fireplaces first emerged in the eighth century. By 1200 an efficient masonry oven was a fixture not only in monasteries and castles but in many private residences as well. While the subsequent centuries brought improvements in ovens, the underlying technology had its limits. One eighteenth-century aristocrat, Elisabeth Charlotte of the Palatinate, Duchess of Orléans, left a vivid account of an insufficient oven in the otherwise sumptuous palace of Versailles. “It is such a fierce cold that it cannot be expressed,” she wrote on January 10, 1709, in a letter to Sophia of Hanover. “I sit by a large fire, have screens in front of the doors, have a sable around my neck, a bearskin wound about my feet, and for all the good that does I am shivering with the cold and can barely hold my quill. In all the days of my life I have never lived through a winter as raw as this one; the wine freezes in the bottles.” [...]
Heating systems went along with another technique for softening winter’s sting: keeping the cold out. When people first began to build small windows in their dwellings, they covered them with animal skins or linen designed to let in at least some light while retaining as much warmth as possible. Later, wooden shutters could seal windows when winter storms raged outside. Windowpanes were reserved for churches until well into the twelfth century and were considered the height of luxury for long afterward. If it got too cold, the solution for millennia was simply to seek refuge in bed: an entire family, along with their servants and guests, might find mutual warmth under the covers. Hanging curtains to create canopy beds or even building alcove beds into the wall provided another layer of heat-trapping protection. [...]
While winter offered certain pleasures, the idea that a winter landscape could be beautiful remained a rare sentiment for centuries. Snow, ice, and glaciers evoked negative associations. Traveling through the mountains during winter was dangerous, and people simply avoided it unless their obligations as tradesmen or pilgrims required it. It took a revolution in perception to make the wintry wilderness appealing. In the late eighteenth century a new obsession with nature as “wild” and “sublime” swept through much of the Western world. Mountains with snow-crowned peaks no longer seemed solely threatening—they also exerted an irresistible fascination. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, always ahead of his time, embodied this shift. He wrote about his Eislust, or passion for ice, which fed both his interest in mountains and his love of skating. In addition to local winter excursions into Germany’s Harz region, he made three trips to Switzerland’s majestic Gotthard Pass, starting in November 1779. Unlike the vast majority of Gotthard travelers, Goethe was not primarily interested in passing from one side of the Alps to the other. Instead he felt magically drawn to the “jagged ice cliffs” of the Rhône Glacier and the “vitriol-blue chasms” he glimpsed there. At the same time, the famous man of letters appreciated civilization’s adaptation to the winter. He became a particular fan of the Swiss masonry oven: “Indeed, it is most delightful to sit upon it, which in this country, where the stoves are made of stone tiles, it is very easy to do.”
