[ANON POST] Medieval Winter Travel

[orange_fell]

Part of the plot in my story revolves around the fact that my characters really need to travel to a specific place - but they live in a very snowy, northern climate, and when the story opens winter is already closing in. To make matters worse, there's a mountain range between them and their intended destination, which they can theoretically travel

Comments

[nineveh_uk]

In some situations, winter can make travel quicker. It's a lot easier to run a sledge over a frozen bog than have to go round it, for instance.

There's some winter travel in Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter, set towards the end of your period, by means of horse/walking, horse-drawn sledge, and (Nordic) skiing. A key question for you is what your mountains are like. Travelling over the Norwegian mountains on medieval skis was fine, but skiing never developed as a mode of transport in the Alps due to the terrain there. It was introduced as a specifically sporting pursuit in the C19.

For other info on skiing, you could look up traditional skiing in the Altai mountains as in this article: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/12/first-skiers/jenkins-text

You could also look up how people travelled over the major Alpine passes in winter. Places like the Great Saint Bernard Pass didn't completely shut down.

[nineveh_uk]

That's very useful info, thank you! Really interesting article in particular.

[elenbarathi]

There's a historically-accurate description of medieval English winter travel in T.H. White's The Once And Future King, after Kay is made a knight and they go to the tournament of the Sword In The Stone.

Some breeds of horses do better in deep snow than others. The Mongols with their outrageously-tough steppe ponies could campaign in the winter - why not? They lived their whole lives outdoors in all weathers anyway, and in winter the rivers are conveniently frozen.

"Jebe's ride across the mountains at the head of an army of 30,000 men into unknown territory makes Hannibal's crossing of the Alps pale in comparison. The Mongol column entered the cleft between the Pamir and the Tien Shan mountains in the dead of winter, often riding through snow five and six feet deep." (Source)
. Our modern Western horses could never survive that. (For that matter, our modern Western soldiers probably couldn't either

[elenbarathi]

"They slept where they could, sometimes in the hut of some cottager who was prepared to welcome them, sometimes in the castle of a brother knight who invited them to refresh thelmselves, sometimes in the firelight and fleas of a dirty little hovel with a bush tied to a
pole outside it-this was the sign-board used at that time by inns-and once or twice on the open ground, all huddled together for warmth between their grazing chargers."

Medieval warm period indeed!

I should have thought to look into the Mongols, and now I will. For whatever reason I am kind of tickled at the idea of goat-sledges. Thanks!

[elenbarathi]

You're welcome! Here's The History of Santa's Reindeer: I've seen Danish Christmas cards where Santa's sleigh is pulled by big white goats.

Horses have to graze, even in the high mountains in mid-winter. Some fodder can be packed as a supplement, but not enough to live on exclusively, and the great Horse Cultures - the Mongols, the Lakota - have been nomads, not farmers. No doubt they gathered the wild grasses, but they weren't systematically haying. (The Once And Future King has a good bit about medieval haying too

[elenbarathi]

The problem is that my story isn't set in England. It's in a fantasy world at a significantly higher latitude (think somewhere between the 60th and 70th parallel north on earth) and with significantly larger mountains. I picked High Middle Ages Europe for a ballpark estimate of the technology available.

Really interesting info about grazers and browsers, thanks.

It doesn't seem counter-intuitive at all, but then I'm from a place that sees a lot of winter both wet and dry, and have done a lot of mountain hiking in the snow.

[stickmaker]

1300 year old ski found in Norway:

http://io9.com/archaeologists-working-in-norway-have-found-a-1-300-yea-1646707211

[okojosan]

National Geographic did an article about hunters with skis in the Altay mountains earlier this year. There was some information there about travel and hunting using skis.

Link to the story.

[okojosan]

You're the second person who's linked to that article here, and it is indeed very good. Thanks!

[transemacabre]

In 1936, the Lykov family holed up in the remote mountains in southern Siberia, remaining isolated from society for an astonishing 42 years. Until they were discovered in the 1970s, these people didn't even know WW2 had happened. Anyway, the reason I'm bringing them up is because the Lykovs learned to survive in some of the most brutal territory imaginable. They didn't have guns or even bows and arrows. Dmitri Lykov used to run animals to the ground, that is, he'd chase a deer until it collapsed from exhaustion, kill the animal, then carry it on his shoulders back home. He ran barefoot in all weather and could sleep outside in 40 degrees of frost. The pots and pans they brought with them rusted into nothingness, and they cooked using birch bark. In comparison, medieval people lived in luxury. The last survivor of this family, Agafia Lykova, still lives on the mountain and the documentaries on her go into a lot of detail as to how she and her family lived