Ice Spirit

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.