Durin

Calendar

Tolkien's only mention of the Dwarves' calendar is in The Hobbit, regarding the "dwarves' New Year" (Durin's Day), which occurs on the day of the last new moon of autumn. However, in his first drafts of the book, Durin's Day was the first new moon of autumn. After he had finished writing the book, Tolkien went back and changed all occurrences of the date to the last new moon, more in keeping with the real-world Celtic calendar, but overlooked one mention in Chapter IV, which still named the date as the first new moon. Tolkien never noticed this inconsistency, and it was not corrected until the 1995 edition of the book. The astronomer Bradley E. Schaefer has analysed the astronomical determinants of Durin's Day. He concluded that – as with many real-world lunar calendars – the date of Durin's Day is observational, dependent on the first visible crescent moon.