Sunday 16th October 1898
H. Rider Haggard (22 June 1856 – 14 May 1925) in his book A Farmer’s Year Being His Commonplace Book For 1898, wrote:
October 16 [1898] . . . . . With what terror must our savage forefathers looked forward to the coming of winter, with its dreadful darkness, its cold, its loneliness, its prowling enemies and ravening beasts? What must it have been even in the Middle Ages, and right down to the last century, when fireplaces in the houses were very few, and scant tallow dips furnished the only illumination; when the roads were such that it took four strong farm-horses to drag a coach along them; when there was no fresh meat for food, and cut-throat footpads lurked in the neighbouring thicket?
To this day our highly civilised race has not got over its dread of winter and the gloom with which it is associated. Even among grown men there are few whom the horror of the dark does not take hold of from time to time, or even of the night when it is not dark. Not long ago I asked a friend, whose name would be known to every reader of this book, and whom one would certainly not associate with such fears, whether he ever felt afraid of being alone at night. He confessed to me that he did – that occasionally, when he sat working late, a panic would seize him, causing him to turn out the lights and slip away straight to bed. I believe that his experience is not by any means exceptional!
We come of a Northern stock, and as all students of the Sagas, that magnificent but neglected literature, will know, to our Norse ancestors some few generations since the dark of the long winter was a fearful thing, peopled with malevolent, able-bodied trolls and with ghosts of the dead.