1816, The Year Without A Summer

As with the rest of the songs on Oh Perilous World the songs are all directly taken from head lines. 1816 actually didn't have a summer - check it out on your own by googling it. The particles of ash from Mt Tambora caused huge fluctuations in the weather that year ~ Vermont and Maine lucked out and only had snow in June, the rest of the midwest had snow all the way through August and the southern states got bizarre cycles of hailstorms which completely decimated crops - it was even reported to drop to 30 something degrees in Georgia one night.

Crazy stuff - my heart aches when I think of what the poor farmers must have gone through. :(

The melody in this song is absolutely mesmerizing - gritty and catching. I think its one of the best songs on the album.

Yea she actually talks about the Medieval Climate Optimum & the little Ice age, both were actually real and both were unpredictably odd.

The Medieval Climate Optimum was an era when the temperatures were above normal and it started around 1315, then shortly after that period the "Little Ice Age" came about. Its all real and really neat!

I really don't think Melora would be against putting blame on human environmental destruction for Global Warming (which isn't even teh scientific name for it). Just look at the lyrics for "A Retinue of Moons". I think this is a song about how one small event can affect everything else --- what if we did not have Frankenstein? What if the Little Ice Age hadn't happened?

The opening lines humorously treat a climatic period, the "Little Ice Age" following the medieval warm period, as though it were a weather event that we could say started and ended at a specific moment: from the spring of 1315 to 1851. In reality this was a gradual cooling trend, not something that suddenly began in a particular month.

Another humorous note is sounded by "You remember 1816 as the year without a summer." Of course no one living remembers that year, and few people are aware of weather events from centuries past. The sudden change of subject suggests that there's a causal link between the Little Ice Age and the freakishly cold summer of 1816, but as the rest of the song will go on to explain, there isn't one.

Did many people at the time think Benjamin Franklin--who had died almost 30 years earlier--or a freemason conspiracy caused the weather events of 1816? I highly doubt it. Doing some searching for Franklin in connection with the summer of 1816 only turned up the interesting factoid that, in addition to doing experiments on electricity, Franklin was actually one of the first people to theorize that unusually cold weather could be caused by the ash kicked into the atmosphere by volcanoes, which turned out to be the cause of the freak weather events of 1816-18. What a clever guy! If anyone has any guesses as to where Melora could have gotten this claim, I'd be interested to hear.

The line "That was the real cause, discovered by some explorer" is puzzling. It makes it sound like Mount Tambora, or the fact that it had erupted in 1815, was only discovered later by Europeans thanks to some voyage of discovery, when in reality Tambora is part of what was then the Dutch East Indies and was reported on by European observers at the time. That said, I'm not an expert and don't know exactly who did first posit a link between the eruption and 1816's unusual weather, so I suppose that person could have been "some explorer." Anyone else know about this?

"You are so very choleric of complexion / Please beware the mounting sun and all dejection" is a quote from a modern English translation of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, specifically the Nun's Priest's Tale, lines 190-91. The hen Pertelote is giving advice to her husband, the rooster Chanticleer, after he has related a disturbing dream he had. The gist is that he's just not taking enough care of his health, the dream being a product of humoral imbalance. How this relates to the previous 2 lines, or how this whole stanza relates to 1816, I am at a loss to understand.

This might be a wacky idea, but all the talk about how Oh Perilous World came out of headlines got me wondering if this song is relating the occurrence in 1816 with the current global warming debate.

"During the most severe years of this little ice age We looked for scapegoats to blame" "The eruption of the volcano Tambora That was the real cause discovered by some explorer Years later, looking back at the past"

May be referring to how many people believe that global warming is all talk, and years from now we might find that the planet is heating due to natural conditions having nothing to do with humans.

Please god don't let this comment start a global warming fight on here >_< Just putting my two cents in, that’s all.

its really about 1816's horrible dismay with no summer. it's about during the Little Ice Age, the year 1816 had an unusual weather pattern (due to the volcano Mount Tambora exploding) and was known as the Year Without a Summer. The song also makes mention of author Mary Shelley writing her infamous novel Frankenstein, Freemasons and Benjamin Franklin.

I agree with Balisong, this song is relating 1816 to global warming, with how people blamed it on conspiracies and such. The song directly relates things in the past to now, talking about how horrible it was and how it could very easliy happen again. I live in northwest washington, and it went between snowing and being warm on and off, which has never happened before, and some weather sources are predicting small snows in June.

Simple, Melora loves history. And what better event to write about then the "little ice age" of 1816? =D

This song is AMAZING!! Love the vocals and the lyrics! GENIUS!!

I just learned about Tambora in Landforms class. I was like, "Ohhh! So that's what Rasputina was singing about!"