The cold war

It is the stuff of nightmares and fever dreams. But it was exactly the fate facing Ernest Shackleton and the men of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition in January 1915 when their ship Endurance became stuck in ice in the Weddell Sea, "the most treacherous and dismal region on earth", in the words of polar historian Thomas R Henry.

What happened in the following months as Shackleton and his crew journeyed for hundreds of miles across some of the world's most inhospitable terrain placed the Anglo-Irish polar explorer high in the pantheon of 20th-century heroes. Shackleton focused his mind so keenly on survival, that he actually pulled it off - against all the odds.

It is real Boy's Own stuff, as you'll discover if you visit the National Library of Scotland's centenary exhibition Beyond Endurance, a display about the 1915 expedition drawn from the personal collection of Shackleton's Glasgow-born geologist, James Mann Wordie. It contains scrapbooks, letters, diaries, photographs, even a series of scientific papers written by Wordie for the Royal Society of Edinburgh. One is titled The Natural History Of Pack Ice As Observed In The Weddell Sea. Wordie never lost his natural curiosity, it seems, even in the teeth of life-threatening danger.

Also included in the collection are some of the many books about polar ­exploration Wordie collected in the years after his snow-bound southern adventure. They have titles both mundane and bombastic - Northward Ho! surely falls into that second category - and those whose covers don't show marauding polar bears and towering ice cliffs feature instead forlorn ships and haggard explorers in furs and oilskins.

The day I visit I don't look so different, and with good reason. The trim on the hood of my parka - an Inuit word, by the way - is faux fur rather than the real thing, but I'm glad of it: outside on Edinburgh's George IV Bridge the so-called "weather bomb" is driving sheets of icy rain across the pavements, causing pedestrians to hunker down like, well, penguins on an ice floe. Inside, #weatherbomb is trending on Twitter. Winter is here with a vengeance, then, and as I stare at one of Frank Hurley's celebrated photographs of the Endurance party, I can feel through my boots the same damp chill this long-dead explorer must have felt as he stared into the camera.

As I write this 24 hours later, the bad weather is still with us and so is that hashtag. The blizzard outside my window is easing but I can see another brewing in the north - the sky over Fife has turned the colour of tungsten, heavy with snow and sleet. Not for nothing have bookmakers slashed the odds on a white Christmas in Glasgow and Edinburgh. They're now at three to one, their shortest for some years.

It is good news for skiers, children and those shopkeepers who stocked up on snow shovels and sledges last month. But this is serious stuff, even in our age of double-glazing, gritting lorries and 6000 BTU radiators (yes, there's a measurement for such things: it stands for British Thermal Unit).

For the decade between 1999 and 2009, there were between 2000 and 4500 "excess winter deaths" annually in Scotland. UK-wide, the yearly figure is about 10 times that, with the over-65s most affected. More than one-quarter of Scottish households, meanwhile, live in fuel poverty, defined as having to spend more than 10% of household income on keeping warm. That rises to more than 50% for those living off the gas grid. The Scottish Government has pledged to eradicate fuel poverty by 2016 but if they are to meet that target they had better hope for some mild winters.

By all accounts, this isn't going to be one. Some weather forecasters are predicting a December freeze as bad as 2010, the coldest since records began 100 years earlier. My children still talk about it, but what they remember is the snowmen, the days off school and how silly they looked in long johns and ski boots.

Older family members may remember their own childhood winters less fondly. Perhaps they recall the so-called "Big Freeze" of 1963, or even the winter of 1946-47, which further traumatised a ­Britain still recovering from war. It was a killer in every sense. The Dover-to-Ostend ferry was cancelled due to the appearance of the dreaded pack ice in the English Channel, there were genuine fears of a famine and Manny Shinwell, then minister of fuel and power (ha!), received death threats. In bombed-out Berlin, meanwhile, cold and hunger killed 150 people and across much of the rest of Europe there was serious civil unrest caused by shortages of food and fuel.

So if these experiences and recollections make those still living wary of cold, it is safe to assume our dead ancestors viewed it with absolute horror. The most recent Ice Age ended only about 10,000 years ago, between the Paleolithic and Mesolithic periods, but by this time religious observance of one sort or another had been around for many thousands of years. So there was plenty of time for a fear of winter and its hardships to become hard-wired into human culture, folklore and belief, particularly in northern Europe.

We see it in any number of pagan festivals centred on the winter solstice, from Rome's Saturnalia to the Anglo-Saxon sacrificial festival of Modraniht to Yule itself. And we see it in the way cold has become a character in its own right, one with icy fingers and a deathly leer. Northern European folk traditions have Old Man Winter and Jack Frost, while in Slavic culture there's Ded Moroz, whose journey from wicked winter sorcerer to Russia's version of Santa Claus required him to drop his centuries-old habits of freezing people and stealing their children. He, in turn, is based on Korochun, the Slavic "Black God" of winter.

This folk memory of what cold can do doesn't all come from ancient history, either. Many of the ­Brothers Grimm stories deal with ice and snow, many others feature children being warned not to stray into forests on pain of being carried away or, worse, eaten. It is thought these date from the Great Famine of 1315-17, when cannibalism was rife across Europe and children were often abandoned or sold. The cause of the famine was the onset of The Little Ice Age, a climactic event that lasted from 1300 to 1850 and sent yet another blast of cold air through the Europe experience, touching politics, economics and even culture - think of The Hunters In The Snow from 1565, one of the most famous (and forlorn) paintings by Northern Renaissance master Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

The onset of The Little Ice Age brought brutal winters to Europe at a time when population growth was putting pressure on food production and saw the Arctic ice pack spreading south for the first time in hundreds of years. Rivers and lakes froze; English wine production ceased. The clear seas the Vikings had sailed through were now freezing and choked with perilous obstacles.

However, the challenge of combating extreme cold did have an upside for our ancestors. Those among our earliest technologies that weren't devoted to ending human lives were devoted to preserving them and a great deal of thought, energy and invention went into their ­development and use. It was to ward off cold that we learned to skin and tan hides, create yarns and textiles, and preserve meat and fish.

As the Canadian archaeologist and historian Robert McGhee notes in his book The Last Imaginary Place: A Human History Of The Arctic World, one of the greatest leaps forwards in terms of human culture and technology actually occurred when ice age conditions prevailed in most of Europe.

McGhee is wary about the theory that this hostile environment stimulated ingenuity, which was used a century ago by those arguing for the racial superiority of Northern Europeans. But he concedes that as the ice sheets gradually retreated north, grazing animals followed and it was through this ready supply of food that migrating humans found an economic basis that allowed their societies and culture to develop along increasingly complex lines. The bison, the aurochs, the ­caribou, the deer: these are what they hunted, and what they painted in cave systems like those at Lascaux in France because it was such an important part of their livelihood.

Likewise during the Little Ice Age, English, Dutch and Basque fishermen adapted their boats to a rougher, colder Atlantic and found they had developed the means to fish deep into the ocean. Like the Stone Age hunters who followed caribou across the icy tundra, these medieval fisherman tapped into a huge offshore resource - cod - that ultimately produced great economic benefits for their respective countries. So the fight against cold hasn't been all bad for humanity.

Ironically, we are currently in one of the most sustained periods of warming ever, but that hasn't stopped us being fascinated by cold and winter. If anything, the rise in global populations and temperatures may make more people want to experience the cold, open, relatively unpolluted wastelands of the polar regions. Meanwhile, it may make writers more likely to turn to winter as metaphor.

The year before he joined Captain Robert Falcon Scott's ill-fated Antarctic expedition, the ­wonderfully named Apsley Cherry-Garrard spent five weeks there in near-­darkness trying to collect penguins' eggs. He would later write that the Winter Journey, as his own expedition came to be known, "had beggared our language: no words could express its horror". It is the cold he is talking about there, I presume, cold which seeps into everything, even the brain.

In Skating To Antarctica, a 1997 memoir of her visit to the polar region, novelist Jenny Diski experiences some of this for herself, but she finds words aplenty with which to describe it. Here she is on a beach in South Georgia, perhaps one on which James Mann Wordie himself once stood: "It was as if the wind, having got my measure, was denying my existence and simply rattling through me," she writes. "I have never felt so unprotected in my life as in that bleak, dark landscape where there is absolutely nowhere to shelter. Only in those dreams where you find yourself walking naked down a busy street have I felt as vulnerable." This, she adds, was "cold as pain rather than mere discomfort".

Jenny Diski and Apsley Cherry-Garrard are far from the only writers to have tried to represent cold. Many's the nameless storyteller who has spun long yarns on even longer nights, finding in winter a handy metaphor for danger, hunger, famine and sterility. In The Lion, Witch And The Wardrobe, remember, CS Lewis creates Jadis, the evil White Witch, who covers Narnia in snow and ice so it is "always winter and never Christmas". Narnia thaws and peace returns only when the Queen is slain by Aslan and the Age of Winter ends. It is a clear borrow from pagan and classical ­mythology, but Lewis pops it happily into his Christian allegory. It works. We get it.

But perhaps the most potent current vision of winter and its perils comes in Games Of Thrones, the blockbuster HBO series based on George RR Martin's fantasy novels. It turns in part on the activities of the men of the Night's Watch and the members of the House of Stark. The first, based at the glowering Castle Black, are a brotherhood who forswear all comforts to spend their lives patrolling The Wall, a massive edifice that guards the Seven Kingdoms from the wintry wastes beyond where there is no rule of law. When they're not fighting, they're shivering.

The Starks are based at the fortress Winterfell and rule the north. In Martin's world, winters last for six or seven years and in series one, the constant refrain from Sean Bean's character, Ned Stark, is the warning his family also bears on its crest: "Winter is coming".

The saying has struck such a chord with fans of the series that it has become a series of internet memes circulating on Facebook, most recently "Brace yourself - Black Friday is coming".

The concept behind internet memes is not one that would be understood by ice-age hunters chasing caribou, cave painters, or medieval fishermen journeying far out to sea in pursuit of cod. ­Starving serfs and Vikings wondering why there is ice where there used to be ocean would have no care for an explanation about Twitter hashtags referring to a weather bomb. But winter, they would certainly ­understand - and braced they would definitely be when it came. We who follow are really no different.