The longest night of the year approaches (at least for those of us in the northern hemisphere). Even in a world of electric lights, S.A.D. lights, and an ability to abscond to sunny places, I count down the hours until time’s pendulum adds shaved seconds of stolen light back into these shortest of days.
Then, on the Winter’s Solstice, I do a happy dance.
I wonder what it must have felt like living through the long winter season during the Dark Ages? (A period that most scholars now refer to as the Middle Ages, but which I still think of it as the Dark Ages.) There was surely laughter and love, stories and song, but in general, I imagine a world that was bleak. The common folks probably lived with few pleasures and many hardships‒especially one notable‒a bookless existence.