Vikings and Violins and Climate Change … Centuries Ago?

Bad weather, ruined harvests, starving farmers flooding cities, resulting in revolution and devastation. Syria in the twenty-first century, or France in the seventeenth? The seventeenth century was a time of turmoil, not just in Europe, but around the globe. This makes it an era of particular interest to me.

The Little Ice Age, aka the Grindelwald Fluctuation, was a period of global cooling particularly pronounced in the North Atlantic. Scientists being scientists, there is debate over both when this occurred and where. The conventional dates are from the 1500s through the 1800s, but there is a clear signal of growing glaciers and more snowfall from about 1250 onward. There’s no consensus on an end date, but 1850 is a reasonable value.

The Maunder Minimum was a period of reduced sunspot activity from 1645 though 1715 that corresponds with the coldest part of the Little Ice Age.

In his book Global Crisis, Geoffrey Parker makes a good case that this climate event had huge impacts on human societies, testing institutions, spurring innovation, and creating widespread misery. Politics and culture interact with the environment in countless ways. Here a just a few of the ones from the LIA that I find interesting.

Storms caused permanent loss of coastal lands in Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands. This is an issue that we’ll be facing a lot in the years to come. The culprit back then was not sea level rise, but an intensification of storms, pushing dunes farther inland, which destroyed stabilizing vegetation, and gave some low lying areas back to the sea.

A fascinating case is the demise of Norse settlement in Greenland. Settlers from Iceland were well established at multiple locations from about 1000 onward. Jared Diamond chronicles the decline of these societies at some length in his book Collapse. Diamond maintains that the Norse were committed to live quite distinctly (as Europeans) from the native Inuit, and this inflexibility led to the complete demise of all their settlements in the face of the colder Grindelwald summers. Okay, so they weren’t really Vikings, just the descendants of Vikings. But they failed to adapt, and perished.

In a time of turmoil, there will be winners and losers. Historian Dagomar Degroot argues that some societies thrived. The people of the Dutch Republic adapted to the transformed environment, and used it effectively both in expanding commerce and in their decades long struggle for independence. The cultural ferment and hunger for innovation of the Northern Renaissance led to breathtaking works of art, a reimagining of financial opportunity, and some pretty horrific colonial abuses.

I play at woodworking from time to time. One of the best teachers I’ve had visualized wood as a bundle of straws. In the LIA, winters were longer, summers were colder, and those straws became smaller and tighter packed. Tighter grains mean desner, tougher wood.

Violin maker Antonio Stradivarius was born at the beginning of the Maunder Minimum, so the wood he worked with came from forests that had matured in the LIA. There is a theory that this denser wood helped give his instruments the haunting tones and resonance that have delighted audiences for centuries.

Even fashion paid its dues to the weather. This was the era when buttons and buttonholes became popular.

The Little Ice Age presented the cultures of its day with challenge and opportunity. Make no mistake, the changed weather was a source of widespread misery and devastation. But if we are to learn from the lessons of the past, let’s take the adaptive, innovative approach of the Dutch, rather than the denial of the Greenland Norse.