Medieval Scandinavian saints, by and large, perform similar miracles to their continental counterparts: helping the blind to see, the lame to walk, and people with pneumonia to breathe. But some of them also provided an additional service: reversing frostbite. Excavated graves at sites where armies are known to have overwintered also suggest the physical toll of northern winters. But at the same time, the methods medieval Scandinavians developed to adapt to their climate proved fundamental to integrating the territory firmly--irreplaceably--into the reviving European economy and political sphere.

The primary means for keeping warm on an individual level in the Middle Ages was fur. As early as the 8th century, rulers from southern Scandinavia intent on extending their territory northward began extracting payment/tribute from the Sami people who populated the Finland/Russia area in furs. As the European economy perked up, more and more furs ended up traveling south with merchants. In return, Scandinavians imported luxury church goods, cloth (even cloth-manufacturing centers import cloth in the Middle Ages), and above all grain from England. Although Scandinavians grew their own crops for consumption, the supplements from England allowed population growth in the north to occur along with a similar explosion on the continent. Archaeologically, we can see that the extent and sophistication of agriculture in Scandinavia increases dramatically in the 11th-12th centuries.

This development coincides with events to the north and east: more powerful groups in Russia were cutting off Scandinavians' access to the richest fur-producing regions like Karelia. But Scandinavians adapted--and made themselves essential to the continent. Medieval people tried their best to build up supplies of food to last through the winter, and William Chester Jordan's study of medieval famines suggests that by the 14th century some regions were regularly storing up enough food to survive one year of bad harvest without unleashing a famine. Nevertheless, people needed something to store up that would last, and also to acquire new food when they didn't have storage (as in cities). And Scandinavia became, in general, where medieval Europe got its preserved fish.

Cod was of course plentiful to catch off the coasts. But the Arctic climate was also perfect, as it turns out, for drying fish for preservation. Local salt mines also allowed fish to be preserved via salting. So Scandinavia's dried cod and salted herring not only fed its native population through the winters, it also went south and fed the growing continental cities.

Farmers could not farm, per se, in the winter, but there was always work to be done with repairs, hunting, and so forth. We know from excavation of army overwinter camps that, already in the days of Viking raids, people would spend winters in craftwork like metalsmithing. There was also more time for games and playing. Ice skates and skis are ancient as an efficient mode of winter transportation, but the earliest references to ice skating as leisure come from the 12th century. From a bit later, the 16th century, there are descriptions of ice skating races. And there are plenty of medieval illuminations of, you guessed it, snowball fights!

Light for crafting and dice would perhaps have been less of a problem, or at least less of an economic problem, in Scandinavia than to the south. Oil for lamps was readily provided by fish and seal oil, which was another key export for the region.

And--crucially--they spent winters caring for livestock. In fact, thanks to the more or less ready supply of dried fish and the import of grain from England, feeding livestock over the winter was almost more of a challenge than feeding people. In fact, the Norse settlements of Greenland didn't even both growing domesticated crops to feed themselves (although they seem to have picked and eaten local berries). They devoted their energy to producing hay to feed their animals through a winter.

Buckland et al. argue that the Greenland settlements' reliance on domesticated livestock, rather than learning from their contact with North American emigres how to travel further into the ocean to hunt bigger and better whales, proved catastrophic. A series of bad harvests meant the livestock starved, and the settlements were abandoned by the end of the Middle Ages. But in the 12th century, the settlers were still supplying Scandinavia with precious walrus ivory and falcons, which the Scandinavians then traded southward.

And then, of course, there were the Scandinavians who found an alternate solution to the long cold winters. Birgitta Birgersdotter was one of the richest noblewomen in 14th century Sweden, with six children surviving to adulthood, significant charity work in her local community, a profitable and influential position in the household of Queen Christina, and an inheritance deep enough to fund the establishment of a continent-spanning monastic order. In other words, she had it pretty good up north. But once her husband died, Birgitta went on permanent pilgrimage to Rome. She spent the rest of her life there--except when she traveled on pilgrimage to the even warmer Near East.