SO, THE snow has fallen, and frost has fettered the ground, as the Anglo-Saxon poets would say, “forste gefeterad”, with the kind of alliteration that fixed winter perfectly in words. As I pull my greatcoat around me against the bitter winds and set off into the sleet, there is a certain grim pleasure in recalling that old poetry. Dr Eleanor Parker, an Oxford lecturer in medieval English, has translated some wonderful weather poetry in her book Winters in the World (Reaktion Books, 2022):

Snow bound the earth
in winter-tumults. The skies grew cold
with hard hail-showers, and ice and frost,
hoary battle-marchers, locked up the homeland of men,
the dwellings of the people. The lands were frozen
with cold and chilly icicles; the force of the waters was
shrunken.
Across the river-currents ice built a bridge,
a dark sea-road.

That passage is from a poem, “Andreas”, that tells apocryphal stories about the extra-biblical adventures of St Andrew (whose feast we keep tomorrow) and St Matthew. Andrew is imprisoned, and the poet is describing a winter storm that assails the world outside his cell.

The language of fetters and locks is not only appropriate to Andrew’s situation in the poem, but also reflects the whole experience of winter for so many of our forebears. Before central heating, before good roads, before all our special thermal fabrics, the only way to get through winter alive was to huddle closely together round a central fire, with the beasts in the byre adding what they could to the warmth.

So, people were, in some sense, imprisoned in their homes by winter. But, on the other hand, that circle drawn close together round the fire is forged, by that same central fire, into family and tribe, into community. The fireside circle, the gathering of heroes in the hall, is a cradle of culture, a place for poetry.

Those vivid evocations of the winter storm would sound all the better with the wind howling outside, but the poetry itself uttered inside, amid the warm, firelit fellowship of the mead-hall.

I would not want to lose the comforts of central heating; but I do feel that we lost a common focus when we lost the home’s only hearth — and the Latin word focus literally meant hearth, or fireplace; like so many words, it is a metaphor whose origins and. therefore, part of whose meaning we have forgotten.

How might we recover such a hearth-focus, such an ingathering as might nurture our common life? Not with one of those flat screens on the wall showing the endless loop of an AI-generated fireplace, nor even with watching the same film together on the same device: an increasingly rare occurrence.

For, though that provides a common focus, there is no space for the conversation and storytelling that are the roots of a common culture. Perhaps the common table, the shared meal, is the last best vestige we have left. There’s a very good precedent for making the breaking of bread and the sharing of wine the all-renewing basis for a new community.

So, devices laid aside, we can draw our chairs closer to the table, feeling all the warmer for the wuthering of the wind outside. We can enjoy some good warm comfort food (bangers and mash for me), raise a glass of ale to defy the darkness, and tell a few tales. The Anglo-Saxon poets would certainly drink to that.