The Culture of Telling Time in Heathenry and Beyond
I have been on a bit of a hiatus because of the intensity of the course I have been taking. It was getting progressively more intense the past few months, but the last two weeks, my residency, was so intense I was barely sleeping and not eating very well. I was a pile of exhaustion after my final exams and final presentation.
The residency really opened my eyes to ways we tell time. When we talk about History in the Montessori classroom it is steeped in Timelines and Mythology from various traditions. We start with the first Great Story. This is the story of the Big Bang and the creation of the Universe, right up until the point just before the first life appears on Earth. This was the time before time. The second Great Story is the story of Life, from the first single cell organism, right up until just before humans appear. This is still the time before time. Because humans created the construct of time. A day is the time it takes Earth to rotate on its axis and a year is the time it takes the Earth to revolve around the Sun (365 days in the modern Gregorian calendar, except Leap Years). Yet, even among humankind we can not agree on how to measure a month or a year. A day is fairly standard, although when exactly a day starts varies across cultures.
Historically, a year was considered to be 360 days approximately by people using mathematics to calculate it based on the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, but many more people used the moon to mark time, the months are based on lunar cycles, and modern months are not perfect to lunar cycles, in order to fit into the scheme of the Gregorian calendar. A lunar month is about 29.5 days, so 12 lunar months account for 354 days of the year. So that leaves 11-12 days per solar year unaccounted for. Different societies have found different ways to account for this.
Some groups have created an extra “month” that consists of those days that is like a time between time. It is marked with festivals and generally not considered a good time for work. This is often what modern Pagan groups do with their Wheel of the Year model, but other groups have also placed this between time in the Summer, or at various other points in the year.
Another way this is handled is by disregarding the solar year entirely and only having a lunar year, this causes the celebrations to slowly rotate over time so that eventually a celebration that was held in Winter will become a Summer celebration and then slowly rotate back again. This is not ideal for northern groups, where seasons are very different from each other.
The third way to deal with this is to add Leap Years. This allows there to be 12 lunar months but every 2-3 years there is a 13th month, so that the calendar keeps holy days approximately in the same season. This was the way that the ancient Heathens marked time.
Of course, there are other ways to create Leap Years, like the method of the Gregorian calendar where one day is added every 4 years. It might seem like a better method to add 1 day every 4 years, rather than a lunar month every 2-3 years, but we are forgetting the mess that was made of the months by the Romans. Why is February 28 days and every other month is 30-31 days under the Gregorian calendar? And things were even messier previously.
The original Roman calendar had 10 months with a 61 ¼ day gap in the Winter, likely for festivities. The Julian calendar introduced 2 new months, January and February. The rest of the months were named Martius, Aprilis, Maius, Juniius, and then counting Quintilis, Sextilis, September, October, November, and December. The Julian calendar aimed to fix the problems of the original Roman calendar by adding a single day every 4 years. The Gregorian Calendar does the same unless the year is divisible by 100 and not by 400, which increases its accuracy to within 26 seconds, every solar year.
But there are still problems with the Gregorian calendar, one was the changing of month names. Where the Julian calendar started in March, the Gregorian calendar starts in January, and then changed the names of Quintilis and Sextilis to July and August. This leaves September through December, with names wrongly numbering their place in the year. The other problem is the previously stated, random numbering of days in a month.
There are two ways to solve this. 1 way would be to have all months of 30 days, equaling a 360 day year. Then a month of 21 days is added every 4 years. This would be very similar to what some ancient Pagans did, but more mathematically sound.
The other option would be to have all months equalling 30 or 31 days. If 6 months had 30 days and 6 had 31 days, that would equal 366 days, the number of a leap year in the Gregorian calendar. So potentially we could say March - July have 31 days each year (5 months), and then February (because it is always February) has 31 days every 4 years for the Leap Year.
Of course, this is solving the problem with mathematics, rather than Heathenry. I would rather use the ancient Heathen calendar, even if it seems a bit confusing at first. It becomes very intuitive once you become attuned to the cycles of the Sun and the Moon and the seasons.
The other thing that happened in the modern Gregorian calendar was the naming of the years. In the Gregorian calendar, the year is 2024. This was something that became clear to me was particularly awkward about teaching time reckoning in a school with diverse students and staff.
Why is it the year 2024? Well, a significant event happened just over 2000 years ago… the birth of Jesus Christ. (I can feel you all cringing as I type.) However, this is the basis of the calendar we use today. If we are explaining it to a child, it has to be brought up. Even if we use CE (Common Era) and BCE (Before Common Era), the origin of our way of numbering years is steeped in Christian religiosity. The year in the Julian calendar would be 2777, with year 1 being the founding of Rome. The Assyrian calendar marks this year as year 6772, and the Islamic calendar as year 1445.
The ancient Heathens did not measure years this way at all, but rather years were measured in relation to important events. At first this would be something like, “4 winters after the Battle of Svolder”, but later years began to be calculated by the rule of kings, such as “the 3rd year of the rule of Harald Fairhaired.” It is not clear when in the year the Heathen calendar started. Some people say Winter Nights and others say Jól. I would say the former, but I can see how arguments would be made for both. Heathen time is not very linear. It is cyclical and dependent on nature itself.
Heathen calendars were not all the same. They varied by region and time period. The Icelandic Misseri calendar was used primarily by farmers, after contact with Christianity. Another calendar used by farmers in Norway after contact with Christianity was the primstav calendar, based on the 19 year Metonic cycle. (It is a derivative of this calendar that Rune Rasmussen is using in his book The Nordic Animist Year).
The calendars that preceded Christianity are difficult to piece together because they were not recorded. The dates of holidays and festivals followed lunisolar reckoning, which meant when the Romans and Muslims encountered them it was difficult for them to describe when these events took place, because their way of reckoning time was so different.
Bede describes the dates of holidays using the Misseri calendar, and these are the most intact dates that we as modern Heathens have for Heathen holidays. What we know is that the ancient Heathens divided the year into two equal parts, Summer and Winter. They celebrated the return of the Sun after the darkness of the long nights of Winter, and celebrated the end of a good and prosperous Summer.
So what does this all mean for modern Heathens? I would say we already use a combination of the ancient Heathen time reckoning, mixed with the Gregorian calendar. I am as likely to say something happened in 2019 as I am to say something happened in the summer where it rained so hard at Midsummer that we took shelter in a stable. I definitely feel more connection to nature using the Heathen calendar and time reckoning, but it is easier to be clearer on dates using the Gregorian calendar. Inevitably in reconstructing time in a Heathen way, it will be done in a way that is meaningful to us. This means that like the ancient Heathens, our reckoning of time will be largely dependent on tribe and region.
Further Reading:
Aldsidu & the Post-Christian Icelandic Misseri Calendar
https://www.aldsidu.com/post/aldsidu-the-icelandic-misseri-calendar
The Calendar of the Vikings
https://www.viking.no/who-were-the-vikings/the-calendar-of-the-vikings/
Calendar: Lunisolar vs Misseri
https://norroena.org/calendar-lunisolar-vs-misseri/
Calendars and Currency: Embedded in Icelandic Culture, Nature, Society and Language by Kristín Bjarnadóttir
The calendar that once ruled Norway
https://www.norwegianamerican.com/the-calendar-that-once-ruled-norway/
Counting the Years the Viking Way
Ethnomathematics at the Margin of Europe: A Pagan Calendar by Kristín Bjarnadóttir
Historical Heathen Holidays and Calendar
https://www.aldsidu.com/post/the-historical-heathen-holidays-and-calendar
The Icelandic Calendar by Svante Janson
Metonic Cycle
https://scienceworld.wolfram.com/astronomy/MetonicCycle.html
Misseri-Calendar: A calendar embedded in Icelandic nature, society and culture by Kristín Bjarnadóttir
Numeric Reckoning
https://www.vikinganswerlady.com/numeric-reckoning.shtml
The Old Norse Calendar
https://valkyrja.com/250621.html
The Origin of the Seven-day Week in Scandinavia by Lasse C. A. Sonne
The Viking Calendar
The Viking Lunar Calendar
https://skjalden.com/the-viking-lunar-calendar-the-names-of-months-and-days/
Viking Time Measurement
https://www.vikingsofbjornstad.com/Viking_Time_Measurement.shtm
Image Source:
Younger furthark runic calendar (1877) by Eirikr Magnusson https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e9/Sami_Runic_Calendar_studied_by_Eirikr_Magnusson_published_1877.jpg
