Now that a new year has started it seems a proper time for an essay on the Shire Reckoning; the calendar comonly in use in the Shire. This calendar shares some similarities with our own, but also contains a lot of differences. The Hobbits divided the year into 12 months, as we do, but in order to keep things simple, all of their months contained 30 days. As there are 365 days in a year, this resulted in 5 days left over. These days were designated as holidays and were inserted into the calendar, outside of the months, as follows; one day at the end of the year (1 Yule ), one day at the beginning of the year (2 Yule ) and three days in the middle of the year, between the 6th and 7th month (1 Lithe, Midyear’s day and 2 Lithe), except on leap years when an additional day (Overlithe) was added after Midyear’s day.
The Hobbits didn’t like the way that each year would start on a different day of the week, finding it to be a bit inconvenient, so in the time of Isengrim II they changed their calendar by no longer assigning a weekday name to midyear’s day (and Overlithe on Leap years). This change, known as the Shire Reform resulted in a calendar that always started on the first day of the week and ended on the last day of the week. These aren’t necessarily the same days as in our calendar; as in many Islamic countries, the shire week started on Saturday and ended on Friday and their equivalent to our weekend of Saturday and Sunday would be Thursday and Friday.
One final difference between the Shire Reckoning and our calendar is the actual seasonal days where the year starts and ends. While our year ends 10 days after the winter solstice (the shortest day of the year), the Shire year ends right on the solstice, meaning that the Shire year actually starts ten days earlier than ours.
For reference, here are the Hobbit names for the days of the week and the months of the year (from Appendix D of The Return of the King) The days of the week were Sterday (Saturday), Sunday, Monday, Trewsday, Hevensday (or sometimes Hensday), Mersday, and Highday (Friday). The months of the year are: Afteryule (January) Solmath, Rethe, Astron, Thrimidge, Forelithe, Afterlithe, Wedmath, Halimath, Winterfilth, Blotmath and Foryule (December). Remember that two Yule days are inserted between Foreyule and Afteryule and three more days; 1 Lithe, Midyear’s day, and 2 Lithe (plus Overlithe on Leap Years) are inserted between Forelithe and Aterlithe.
These differences between our two calendars become important when we celebrate various middle Earth events. I’ll use the destruction of the ring as an example. In the Shire Reckoning, the date the ring was dropped into the Cracks of Doom (March 25th) is the 86th day of the year (Lithe plus 30 days in each of Jan. and Feb. plus 25 more in March). This would correspond to March 27th on our calendar (31 days in Jan. plus 28 in Feb. plus 27 more in March). But the Shire year actually started 10 days earlier than our year, so the corresponding day in our calendar would then become March 17th; so we would be perfectly correct in celebrating the great accomplishments of the Hobbits on St. Patrick’s Day. To me this also suggests some possible relationship between Hobbits and the Leprechauns we often think about when considering St.Patrick’s Day (don’t Leprechauns and Hobbits both like riddles?), but that discussion can be saved for some future date.
by PotbellyHairyfoot
One response to “The Shire Reckoning, or How the Hobbits simplified their Calendar”
Don’t forget the cool date feature we have here; in your account settings you can change the date that’s visible at the top right of your screen (except in the Aragorn theme) to the Shire date. The date isn’t similar to what Tolkien describes in his book, in that the summer solstice doesn’t differ by our middle of the year by ten days, but eleven or twelve, I think. This is because A) the good professor didn’t think to take into account the fact that the summer solstice isn’t actually at the same time of the year, each year, and B) the fact that the book was written more than half a century ago. Our Shire dates should be good for some eight years, though. (note that our dates are actually more accurate than other sites’ in that respect!)