Winters in the World: a journey through the Anglo-Saxon year

In Winters in the World Eleanor Parker looks at the Anglo-Saxon calendar, especially the four seasons Winter, Spring, Summer and Harvest. Throughout the book she quotes from the few pieces of Anglo-Saxon poetry and other writing that remain today to illustrate how the Anglo-Saxons viewed the change in the seasons and how the seasons affected the daily life of people living at that time. The author looks at the various festivals and special days celebrated throughout the year and the affect of Christianity on the celebration of some of these events. 

A major feature of the Anglo-Saxon year were the winter and summer solstice and the two equinoxes. Events celebrated in the Christain church often also occur at these times. Throughout the year, whatever happens life goes on. Eleanor Parker ends, in the acknowledgements (p259), with a quote from St Augustine's Soliloquies going back to the time of Alfred the Great:

You rule the year, and govern it through the turning of the four seasons, that is, spring and summer and harvest and winter. These change places, each with another, and turn so that each of them is again exactly what it was before, and where it was before; and likewise all heavenly bodies change places and turn in the same way, and the sea and rivers too. In this way all created things undergo change.

NB: On page 219 mention is made in reference to Shakespeare's play, MacBeth, that Malcolm, who becomes king of Scotland, would marry Edward the Confessor's great niece, Margaret, - "thus uniting himself to the last surviving branch of the the Anglo-Saxon royal family and helping to ensure its continuation after the Norman Conquest". The Normans on arrival in England also valued connections with Anglo-Saxon England. William the Conquoror's wife, Matilda had Anglo-Saxon royal connections on one side of her family as did Henry I's wife, Edith (later Matilda), the daughter of King Malcolm of Scotland and Queen Margaret.

At the end of the book is an extensive list of references, a bibiography and an index.