A Runic calendar (also Rune staff or Runic Almanac) is a perpetual calendar, variants of which were used in Northern Europe until the 19th century. A typical runic calendar consisted of several horizontal lines of symbols, one above the other. Special days like solstices, equinoxes, and celebrations (including Christian holidays and feasts) were marked with additional lines of symbols. Runic calendars were written on parchment or carved onto staves of wood, bone, or horn. The oldest one known, and the only one from the

Middle Ages In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire ...

, is a staff from

Nyköping Nyköping () is a locality and the seat of Nyköping Municipality, Södermanland County, Sweden with 32,759 inhabitants as of 2017. The city is also the capital of Södermanland County. Including Arnö, the locality on the southern shore of the ...

, Sweden, believed to date from the 13th century. Most of the several thousand which survive are wooden calendars dating from the 16th and the 17th centuries. During the 18th century, Runic calendars had a renaissance, and calendars dating from around 1800 were made in the form of brass tobacco boxes. The calendar is based on the 19 year-long

Metonic cycle The Metonic cycle or enneadecaeteris (from grc, ἐννεακαιδεκαετηρίς, from ἐννεακαίδεκα, "nineteen") is a period of almost exactly 19 years after which the lunar phases recur at the same time of the year. The rec ...

, correlating the Sun and the Moon, but the calendar does not prove knowledge of the length of the

tropical year A tropical year or solar year (or tropical period) is the time that the Sun takes to return to the same position in the sky of a celestial body of the Solar System such as the Earth, completing a full cycle of seasons; for example, the time ...

or of the occurrence of

leap year A leap year (also known as an intercalary year or bissextile year) is a calendar year that contains an additional day (or, in the case of a lunisolar calendar, a month) added to keep the calendar year synchronized with the astronomical year o ...

s. The two sliding halves are aligned and set at the beginning of each year by observing the first

full moon The full moon is the lunar phase when the Moon appears fully illuminated from Earth's perspective. This occurs when Earth is located between the Sun and the Moon (when the ecliptic longitudes of the Sun and Moon differ by 180°). This mean ...

after the first new moon after the

winter solstice The winter solstice, also called the hibernal solstice, occurs when either of Earth's poles reaches its maximum tilt away from the Sun. This happens twice yearly, once in each hemisphere (Northern and Southern). For that hemisphere, the winte ...

. The first full moon also marked the date of '' Disting'', a pagan feast and a fair day also known as Thing of all Swedes.

Marks

On one line, 52 weeks of 7 days were laid out using 52 repetitions of the first seven runes of the

Younger Futhark The Younger Futhark, also called Scandinavian runes, is a runic alphabet and a reduced form of the Elder Futhark, with only 16 characters, in use from about the 9th century, after a "transitional period" during the 7th and 8th centuries. The r ...

. The runes corresponding to each weekday varied from year to year. On another line, many of the days were marked with one of 19 symbols representing the 19 Golden numbers, for the years of the

. In early calendars, each of the 19 years in the cycle was represented by a rune; the first 16 were the 16 runes of the

, plus three special runes improvised for the remaining three years. The new moon would fall on that day during that year of the cycle. For example, in the 18th year of the cycle, the new moons would fall on all the dates marked with ''tvimadur'', the symbol for year 18. Later calendars used Pentadic numerals for the values 1–19. Because this system needed 19

runes Runes are the letters in a set of related alphabets known as runic alphabets native to the Germanic peoples. Runes were used to write various Germanic languages (with some exceptions) before they adopted the Latin alphabet, and for specialised ...

to represent the 19 golden numbers which stood for the 19 years of the perpetual calendar's cycle, the

was insufficient, having only 16 characters. The solution devised was to add three special runes to represent the remaining numbers: (''arlaug''; Golden Number 17), (''tvimadur'' or ''tvímaður''; Golden Number 18), and (''belgthor''; Golden Number 19). In 1636, Ole Worm documented the Younger Futhark numeral system, including these three characters, in his ''Runir seu Danica literatura antiquissima'' (''Runes: the oldest Danish literature''). A version using the

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the ...

for weekdays and Arabic numerals for the golden numbers was printed in 1498 as part of the ''Breviarium Scarense''.

Primstav

A primstav is the ancient Norwegian calendar stick. These were engraved with images instead of runes. The images depicted the different nonmoving religious holidays. The oldest primstav still in existence is from 1457 and is exhibited at Norsk Folkemuseum.

Modern use

Adherents of the

Estonia Estonia, formally the Republic of Estonia, is a country by the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland across from Finland, to the west by the sea across from Sweden, to the south by Latvia, and t ...

n ethnic religion ('' Maausk'') have published Runic calendars ( et, sirvilauad) every year since 1978. Until 1991, the calendar was an illegal '' samizdat'' publication under the Soviet government.

References

External links

* * {{Germanic peoples Obsolete calendars Specific calendars Calendar Medieval runes Modern runic writing

Marks

Primstav

Modern use

See also

References

Further reading

External links