The Worst Year Ever

How the trees and ice kept the truth of the Volcanic Winter of 536 CE.

I’ve been thinking about this post for a while and talking about the worst year ever feels like it won’t further depress anyone this week so...

And it turns out the worst year ever is important to our story.

In 536 CE* we now know one or more volcanic eruptions in the Northern Hemisphere caused an unprecedented cooling of the climate and an obscuring of the sun for over a year. The crop failures and hardship that would have accompanied such a cataclysmic event were significant and widespread. But people living through that time had no way of knowing or recording what caused this portend of doom in their skies. They just had to survive it. What would we do if we didn’t have ancient tree rings and glacier cores to fill in the blanks of history beyond our species’ contemporary understanding? They recorded with greater accuracy the truth of these times than even the most resourced scriptorium.

The human sources we see in retrospect from China, Syria, Rome, Ireland, and more tell us simultaneously that at this time the sun shone feebly for a year and a half, there were no shadows at noon, that the clouds were stretched like a hide across the sky, impenetrable and there was “a failure of bread.” It was widely agreed that 536 was the worst year to be alive in our modern historical knowledge.

In 536 St Columba was 15 years old.

The Annals of Inisfallen say the "bread failed” from 536-539 in Ireland. Columba’s noble lineage probably protected him from the worst of the death and starvation.

But it tells us a lot about the world he was taking the new faith out into. A world where the Sun Gods had abandoned the people beyond imagining. Where brutal deaths of starvation would have deeply touched most communities. Where the resourced, wealthy communities of the monasteries would have seemed to have indeed been divinely favoured and rewarded for their beliefs (or the story could have been told that way) versus the acknowledgment of the cushioning of wealth and resources.

Columba arrived on Iona in 563. I always wondered why people were so susceptible to conversion. Now I imagine that those looking to convert find a way to tell them what they want to hear. And it doesn’t seem too difficult for me to imagine Columba reminding the Picts and others his mission sought to convert of the darkness and loss only a few years distant. To use the natural disaster as evidence of the fickleness of their nature gods and the stable power of his. The wounds would have been fresh still and I can’t imagine he would have abstained from pressing the bruise to achieve his means. And it worked.

But the trees and the ice kept the truth until we could find it again.

Until next time,

Susie

*If you are like me and wonder what happened while I wasn’t paying attention to using AD and BC when we write about years, here’s a really good description of the events that led both to the BC/AD designations in dates and how that has morphed into BCE/CE. https://www.calendarr.com/united-states/bc-and-ad-their-meaning-and-differences/