Lord of the Rings : The Return of the Read - Appendix D. Calendars
Look, just a little bit more of this and we'll be on to narrative again. I promise. We have Bilbo's Last Song scheduled for 7/16, and then my partner in crime and I go on to... *gulp* The Silmarillion. I have read it before, so I know what I'm getting into and I'm looking forward to tackling it with analysis in mind.
In the mean time, we have Calendars... which is not completely trivial since Tolkien uses and refers to multiple different calendars throughout the story. I personally appreciate the "every month has the same number of days" with holidays filling in the gaps. The fact that Tolkien included different cultural calendars is also significant, especially with largely segregated cultures that have their own relationships with the world, time, and even lifespans. From a comprehensive world building stand point, it would probably be stranger if the elves, men, hobbits, and dwarves all had the same calendar, but often in fiction that's exactly what we see.
The level of detail becomes a bit staggering, with inclusion of details of the millennial deficit of the Numenor calendar down to the seconds. It only really makes sense when you look at this as a small piece of a larger body of work that encompasses the mind-bogglingly detailed world building of Middle Earth.
In the mean time, we have Calendars... which is not completely trivial since Tolkien uses and refers to multiple different calendars throughout the story. I personally appreciate the "every month has the same number of days" with holidays filling in the gaps. The fact that Tolkien included different cultural calendars is also significant, especially with largely segregated cultures that have their own relationships with the world, time, and even lifespans. From a comprehensive world building stand point, it would probably be stranger if the elves, men, hobbits, and dwarves all had the same calendar, but often in fiction that's exactly what we see.
The level of detail becomes a bit staggering, with inclusion of details of the millennial deficit of the Numenor calendar down to the seconds. It only really makes sense when you look at this as a small piece of a larger body of work that encompasses the mind-bogglingly detailed world building of Middle Earth.
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