The Anglo-Saxon Calendar
The calendar used by the Anglo-Saxons in pre-christian times remains a mystery, albeit not a complete mystery. In De Temporum Ratione Bede left us enough information to paint a rough picture of the early calendar, but not enough to understand the detail of how the calender was applied and (more importantly) regulated. This collection of pages is intended to shed a little light on what is known, or can be surmised, about our ancient Englisc calendar.
This article presents what is known from Bede, and shows that there is precious little concrete information from which "The Authentic" pre-christian Anglo-Saxon calendar may be reconstructed. The calendar constructed by the late Professor J R R Tolkien for the Shire, which appears in The Lord of the Rings (Appendix D vol. 3 p384) might be suitable for present day use. The names of the months are "worn-down forms of the Old English names", and could easily be reinstated (Permission was sought and granted by Professor Tolkien for such use within the Fellowship). However, it must be emphasized that this calendar has no authority as a genuine Englisc calendar (it is not, in fact, a hobbit calendar either, but an Elvish one), and was only ever used in the "third age of Middle Earth". In particular, it does not use lunar months - and therefore a third Liða does not appear.
Perhaps more satisfactory is to use a method which utilises all the information which is available to reconstruct a calendar which not only matches what is known about the real thing, but relies on astronomical observation (rather than technology) and is therefore more likely to have been used in early England.
Just such a method came to my notice recently and Robert Stone has kindly given permission for his paper to be reproduced on Ða Engliscan Gesiðas web site. Stone's work is meticulous and accurate, any mistakes have almost certainly been introduced during the conversion for the WWW.
Stone's paper was the inspiration for a web page using a JavaScript program which produces the current date in a reasonable pre-christian Anglo-Saxon form. My apologies to those using browsers which do not support JavaScript (I recommend acquiring Netscape Navigator 4 soonest) but my server doesn't support cgi. I should point out that to use the page properly you need to know your location Latitude and Longitude. Although accuracy is not paramount, the reckoning is improved greatly if you can get within a few degrees.
If anyone is interested I may produce an enhanced version of the A-S calendar to run standalone as either a Windows programme or in Java™, in which case it ought to be fully cross-platform.
