Ice

Personification of Frost in English/Norse Folklore

Jack Frost is the personified spirit of frost and cold in English and Scandinavian folklore, appearing as a young boy or mischievous old man, the canonical iconographic figure that draws ice-flower patterns (frost ferns) on windows on winter mornings and nips people's noses and toes. The etymology is the combination of the English Jack (a generic male name) and Frost (frost, from Old English forst), and the first decisive textual record of English Jack Frost appears in the 1734 poem A Mountain of Frost in the British London Magazine. The iconographic origin is the fusion of (1) the Norse-mythological frost-giants Jokull ('glacier') and Frosti ('frost') of Chapter 1 of the Halfdanar saga svarta of the Heimskringla of the early-thirteenth-century Icelandic poet Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241), and (2) the Morozko ('Little Frost') and Ded Moroz ('Grandfather Frost') canon in the Russian Folk Tales (Narodnye Russkie Skazki) of the Russian folklorist Alexander Afanasyev (1826-1871) of 1855-1863. The decisive modern canon is the 1944 song The Christmas Song by the American composer Mel Torme (1925-1999) and lyricist Robert Wells (1922-1998) — with the line 'Jack Frost nipping at your nose' — which decisively settled the twentieth-century global Jack Frost canon, and the Jack Frost protagonist of the DreamWorks animated film Rise of the Guardians (released 21 November 2012 in the USA, based on William Joyce) is the twenty-first-century global Jack Frost cinematic canon.

Hunter of the Frozen Wastes

The White Dragon is one of the five branches of the chromatic dragons that took root in the 1974 first edition of Dungeons & Dragons by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, a cold hunter that holds the year-round snowfields of the polar seat and the frozen wasteland as its own territory. Scales as white as snow melt into the white seat of glacier and ice without leaving a single shadow, and from its mouth it breathes a single straight line of cold that brings the death of one breath, freezing man and beast at one seat. Among the five chromatic dragons, black, blue, green, red, and white, this one stands at the seat of the lowest intelligence, but the hunting instinct of the beast is set most clearly at the same seat in turn, and once it has fixed a prey, it follows for days at one seat with great patience. Its lair is a cave in a glacier or a deep seat in year-round snow, and within it the figure of the bodies of men and beasts killed in the same hunt, preserved forever in ice, is the clearest mark of one seat.

Yuki-onna · The Snow Woman — A Cold, Sorrowful Beauty Appearing in the Blizzard

The Yuki-onna (Japanese Yuki-onna, 'snow woman') is the pale female yokai who appears suddenly in the night blizzard, the canonical iconographic figure of the Japanese winter snow-mountain yokai who in white kimono, jet-black hair, and a bloodless face approaches the lost traveller and freezes him to death with her cold breath. The iconographic origin is the fusion of the lethal-cold (toshi) folklore of Japan's heavy-snowfall regions in Tohoku, Chubu, and Hokkaido with mountain-deity (yama-no-kami) belief. The earliest textual record is the Sogi Shokoku Monogatari, a travel account by the renga poet Sogi (1421-1502) of the late Muromachi period (estimated late fifteenth century), describing a tall white-clad woman encountered in the snow mountains of Echigo Province (now Niigata Prefecture). In the Edo period, the Yuki-onna was systematised as a canonical yokai in the yokai catalogue Gazu Hyakki Yagyo (1776) of Toriyama Sekien (1712-1788). The decisive canon is the short story Yuki-Onna in Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, the English-language short-story collection published in April 1904 by Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904, Japanese name Koizumi Yakumo): the woodcutters Mosaku (the elder) and Minokichi of Musashi Province are trapped in a blizzard and rest in a hut, where the Yuki-onna kills Mosaku but spares the young Minokichi on his promise never to disclose the secret; years later Minokichi marries a woman named Oyuki, who turns out to be the same Yuki-onna, and she vanishes when he breaks the secret. This established the decisive canon of modern Yuki-onna iconography. Masaki Kobayashi's 1965 film Kwaidan, with its Yuki-onna episode, won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and completed the global canon.