New Reckoning - Calendar in 4th Age Gondor & Arnor

[Valandil]

Backstory: I was doing an LOTR re-read, and got side-tracked from Appendix D to read 8 other books. (two early American stories by Kenneth Roberts, and the six complete Jane Austen novels). Anyway - got back and had only about 2 pages left in Appendix D. Read those yesterday, and noticed some interesting stuff right at the end, which I hadn't noticed before. Don't know if I was so much more interested in pre-4th age dating, or if my eyes and mind were glazed over in previous readings by that point or whatever.

So here's the deal - I knew that March 25 was reckoned New Year's Day in the Restored Kingdom in the 4th Age - because of the destruction of the Ring and Sauron's (and Mordor's) Fall on that day. What I didn't catch at first - it looks like that day - March 25 - became the start of April in later years - April 1. So all the months were shifted a few days. And the middle days of the year falls in the Shire's September, just after (Bilbo and) Frodo's birthday - September 22. In the Restored Kingdom, they make that birthday (adjusted, I suppose - right at the end of September) a big holiday. For Leap Years - this becomes the day they double up, just before the three "middle days".

It's humorous too - and so "Shire-like" - as JRRT points out the differences between New Reckoning in Gondor & Arnor - and the continuation of Shire Reckoning. Differences:
*The Shire continues their own progression of year numbers, instead of re-starting at "1"
*The Shire considers Yule 2 of 1422 (their standard New Year's Day) as the start of the Fourth Age, whereas Gondor treated it as March 25 (now April 1? not totally clear), 3021 - over 9 months earlier.
*While Frodo was honored by all the rest of the world by having his birthday celebrated - there was no celebration at September 22 in the Shire.
*The only holidays in the Shire associated with those times are - April 6, which has three alternate explanations associated with the celebration - and November 2, which is celebrated with blowing of horns and feasting, to commemorate the Scouring of the Shire. All locally-connected commemorations.

I guess I used to think that when March 25 became the New Year's Day - that this meant, for instance - one day might be March 24, Year 10 - the next would be March 25, Year 11. That seemed a bit odd to me - but whatever. However, there's a line in the narrative stating that the year now began with April. This is what I didn't catch before.

And... we see further the provincial tendencies of the Hobbits.

[Valandil]

Guess we need something more interesting to talk about. But calendars interest me.

[Alcuin]

Tolkien is replicating what’s called in English the Old Style (O.S.) calendar.

When you look up the birth date of George Washington, for instance, you’ll find it listed as “February 22, 1732/Old Style: February 11, 1731” or “February 11, 1731 (O.S.)”. Benjamin Franklin’s birth day is sometimes listed as “January 17, 1706 [O.S. January 6, 1705]”. I recall tombstones in Boston listing birth dates as such-and-such “O.S.” for “Old Style”.

The old Roman calendar begins the year on January 1: Janus is the two-faced Roman god, looking backward into the past and forward into the future. But the Byzantines, who incidentally also called themselves Romans and were legally and in fact the surviving Roman Empire until the Fall of Constantinople on May 29, 1453, began their legal year on September 1. Similarly, in matching the reigns of kings of Judah, the southern kingdom, and kings of Israel, the northern kingdom, the Judeans used a calendar that began with Passover in the spring, while the Israelites used a calendar that began with Rosh Hashanah in the fall, so there’s always a six-month discrepancy in which year is being discussed. Is it a Judean year or an Israelite year; an old Roman year or a Byzantine year?

There is a similar confusion in English years. The exact details are intricate, so I don’t want to delve into them with precision, but here’s the general outline.

William the Conqueror was crowned in London on Christmas Day Anno Domini (AD) 1066, ab urbe condita (AUC) 1908. (Ab urbe condita means “from the founding of the city” of Rome, and since old Roman years begin January 1 as do our own, it’s a convenient reference. AUC 1 is our year 753 BC. When you do conversions, remember that there is no year zero! All calendars world-wide, regardless of their origins, begin with year 1.) So beginning in 1066, the legal year in England began on Christmas Day. (Coincidentally, Aragorn and the Fellowship of the Ring set out from Rivendell on Christmas Day.)

During the reign of Henry II in 1155, the king and clergy instituted the practice of beginning the civil New Year on March 25. March 25 is “Lady’s Day”, the Feast of the Annunciation, when the archangel Gabriel visited the Virgin Mary. This was an important day in England’s economic, religious, and legal calendar: It was the beginning of spring, which determined planting, harvesting, and the husbandry of animals; always near Easter, the penultimate Christian holy day; and one of the quarter-days of the religious calendar, at which times rents and taxes were due (Lady’s Day, March 25; the Nativity of St John the Baptist, June 24, near midsummer; Michaelmas, the Feast of St Michael on September 29 near the beginning of autumn (and Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur); and Christmas near the beginning of winter).

Beginning English years on March 25 put the English calendar in line with the rest of the Catholic west. In AD 525 (about the time of King Arthur, by the way), the monk Dionysius Exiguus (“Dennis the Humble”, alternately translated “Dennis the Short”) calculated the birth of Christ as December 25, AUC 753. Since Gabriel visited Mary on March 25, he reckoned that God entered the world as an Incarnate on March 25. Dionysius believed this in part because Alexander the Great had conquered the known world in 33 years, and many Christian scholars and theologians argue that the New Testament indicates Jesus was 33 when He was crucified, and since Alexander could not be greater than Jesus, they must both have been 33 years old at death. (I think Dionysius was wrong, and I believe most modern scholars do, too: Jesus was most likely nearly 40 when he died.) Unlike modern scholars, ancient scholars were in no doubt about what day Jesus died, because His crucifixion was an intentionally public and horrific execution. His followers knew it had occurred on Friday April 3, 786 AUC. So counting backward, Dionysius set 753 AUC as AD 1, and he began his year on March 25. (If you doubt the date of the crucifixion, consider this: As I post this, we are one year further from October 12, 1492, when Columbus landed in the New World, than Dionysius Exiguus was from the Crucifixion. Columbus’ voyage was 526 years ago. Just think: in 1491 years, over-credentialed scholars from self-selecting sects of “professionals” will argue about exactly what year Columbus sailed, whether he left Palos de la Frontera on August 3 or some other day, and whether he really landed on October 12 or another day, whether he lied about the voyage and its dates, and whether he really ever existed at all or was just an invention of others to cover their tracks and justify their excesses.)

Easy to follow, right?

By the mid-1500s, Christians began to notice that their calculations of Easter, which they reckoned without the Jewish calendar (a lunar calendar that uses 12 months with an occasional extra, 13th month added to keep it aligned to the solar year) to find Passover (Jesus was crucified at Passover: He is called the “Lamb of God”) since the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, had begun to get out of alignment with the Jewish calendar. (Actually the Council of Nicaea was held in 1078 AUC: there was as yet no Anno Domini calendar, because Dionysius Exiguus had not yet even been born.) The papal astronomers told the cardinals that if things went on as they were going, Easter would eventually fall in late rather than early spring. So in AD 1545, the Council of Trent authorized Pope Paul III to order a study, and eventually the astronomers recommended adding an extra day to the calendar every four years, except on the four hundredth year (i.e., years evenly divisible by 400: the millennial year 2000 was not a leap year). That stabilized the calendar for several thousand years as far as Easter was concerned. (Calendars based don’t exactly match the solar cycle. They have to be adjusted from time to time.) During the time the astronomers debated all this, there were two more popes (Pius IV and Pius V), until in AD 1582, a fourth pope, Gregory XIII, and his advisors decided everything was finally in order. They decreed that Thursday, 4 October 1582 would be followed by Friday, 15 October 1582, skipping ten days in the calendar. The directive also moved the beginning of the year from March 25 to January 1. So if your birthday fell between January 1 and March 25, your official year of birth was suddenly one year later than your mother had told you.

The Catholic countries complied, with some reservations. There was some pain and grief: superstitious people are supposed to have thought they were losing ten days of their lives, but I suspect those stories are like the claim that medieval people thought the earth was flat. (They didn’t: the Portuguese refused to finance Columbus’ voyages because they knew the correct circumference of the earth but, since they did not know about the New World continents we now call North and South America, supposed he would die before he reached the Indies. Columbus thought the distance to the Indies 5,000 miles: it’s 20,000 miles. The lie - because that’s what it is - that people believed the earth was flat can be traced to nineteenth century antagonism against religion arising from Protestant animosity towards Catholicism, exacerbated by the church’s initial rejection of the theory of evolution.)

Protestant countries and Orthodox Christians refused to change calendars. The Orthodox still use the old calculations for Christmas and Easter to this day. Protestant countries didn’t change until later: Great Britain changed in 1752, when Washington was 20, Franklin 46. The Russians didn’t change until February 14, 1918, after the Bolsheviks seized power: the October Revolution of 1917 is named for the month it took place in the Julian calendar: it really took place in November in the Gregorian calendar: the revolution was October 25 O.S., November 7 N.S. (New Style, Gregorian)

Traditional beginnings of years are still followed. Chinese New Year is in three days for me, February 16 this year. (The Chinese also use a lunar calendar. And since this post is late in the evening, that’s two days away if you’re in Europe.)

Isn’t this fun? An old Animaniacs cartoon addresses a similar issue for local time.

Tolkien addresses this issue in Appendix B, the “Tale of Years”, as well as Appendix D. In Third Age 3019, Shire Reckoning 1419, the new year was counted as beginning March 25, just as with the old Anno Domini calculations of Dionysius Exiguus and in medieval England. Near the end of Appendix D, Tolkien tells us,

The Fourth Age was held to have begun with the departure of Master Elrond, which took place in September 3021; but for purposes of record in the Kingdom Fourth Age 1 was the year that began according to the New Reckoning in March 25, 3021, old style.

This reckoning was in the course of the reign of King Elessar adopted in all his lands except the Shire, where the old calendar was retained and Shire Reckoning was continued. Fourth Age 1 was thus called 1422; and in so far as the Hobbits took any account of the change of Age, they maintained that it began with 2 Yule 1422, and not in the previous March.

As a final note to this much-too-long post, in Letter 176, Tolkien writes,

I am sorry about my childish amusement with arithmetic; but there it is: the Númenorrean [sic] calendar was just a bit better than the Gregorian: the latter being on average 26 sec[ond]s fast p[er] a[nnum], and the N[úmenórean] 17.2 sec[ond]s slow.

.

If you made it this far, the entire letter to Naomi Mitchison, 8 December 1955, published in edited form in Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter 176, is currently up for sale, asking price US $22,000 (£15,825.48, €17.787,88). “With original autograph addressed envelope.” There are images of the original document at the link, 4 pages on two leaves of paper (that is, written back and front), along with an image of the addressed envelope. I hope one of you may obtain it.

Apologies for the long post. I’m sure this is all clear as mud.

PS - in the US, the calendar year begins on January 1. The Fiscal Year begins October 1. No matter when you look or where you look, the confusion remains.

[Valandil]

Wow! How exhaustive of you! As per your usual work.

One mistake I noticed - unless it was changed later and you didn't get around to explaining it. Leap years are every 4 years, except that they do not occur every 100 years, except that they DO occur every 400 years. That's a cloudy way to say that: 1700, 1800 and 1900 were not Leap Years, but 2000 actually WAS a Leap Year.

Otherwise - great information. Thank you for that!

[Alcuin]

Mea cupla! My bad.

Valandil is right. AD 2000 was a leap year. What made it different was that it was a centennial year (evenly divisible by 100) that was a leap year. AD 1900 was not a leap year. AD 2100 will not be a leap year. But AD 2400 will be.

Thank you for the compliment, Valandil.