The Hobbit calendar and other calendars of Middle-earth

Tolkien is known for his language creation, but he was also masterful at creating calendars for the cultures and peoples that inhabit Middle-earth. The Shire calendar is beautifully practical - twelve months, thirty days each. Every month lines up neatly with the phases of the moon. That makes it much more regular than our messy Gregorian calendar, with its whole "thirty days hath September" guessing game. The hobbits liked their schedules steady and predictable. In fact, it's one of the few calendars where every date falls on the same day of the week every single year. So, if your birthday's on a Friday this year - bad news if you don't like Fridays - it's always on a Friday.

Transcript

A first edition set of The Lord of the Rings books, a three-book set, sold at auction for an brain melting $250,000. Think of that. Someone just paid a quarter of a million dollars for a set of books you can pick up at any Barnes & Noble for approximately $37 dollars or $25 at Amazon right now AFFILIATE LINK: https://amzn.to/4pRkSsZ at Amazon and in the U.S. it will be at your door by Christmas Eve. So why? Why are collectors and super fans willing to shell out so much for a set of stories most of us can get for a few taps on our smartphones?

Reminder: In February, London-based Forum Auctions sold a fully signed, first-edition set for approximately $337,000, or 288,000 British Pounds.

But this $250K more than doubles the previous record of from 2021 for an unsigned edition. Now, obviously these are hard to come by and as time goes on, harder and harder to come by. There was a run of only 3,000 and these were first edition, first impression. I wish I had 300K, I would buy them as an investment with the danger that I wouldn't be able to part with them.

So why is somebody willing to pay that?

The answer, of course, is in the depth of J.R.R. Tolkien's world-building. The sheer meticulousness of his craft. The care and thought and - yes - the love he poured into every page. Because when you dive into Middle-earth, you're getting a ripping good story about Hobbits and wizards and kings and wars and swords and friendship and sacrifice and loss and triumph and tragedy BUT you're also getting a fully realized history, a mythology, a tapestry of languages and cultures stretching back thousands of years. 

Tolkien is well known as a language creator, but I can't remember the last time somebody celebrated what a good calendar creator he is, and yet, he very much is.

The way he keeps time in Middle-earth shapes the story he's telling. So today, as we head toward the New Year, we are going to talk Tolkien-created calendars. My name is Larry and you're listening to The Tolkien Podcast.

~~BREAK~~

It's late December. Personally, for me, a trying year but also the year I finally launched The Tolkien Podcast. Personally for many listeners, a trying year. And yet, if you're listening, it looks likely that we made it through. We've made it and will go on to 2026.

Tolkien and time. Because, as I mentioned, the way he structures his calendars in Middle-earth is one of those little masterstrokes that makes his world feel so rich and lived-in. And it all starts with the Shire Reckoning - the calendar the hobbits use in The Lord of the Rings. It's also very tied to the moon. If you recall, besides trees and landscape, we hear moon reports fairly frequently.

Now, if you're like most readers, you probably haven't given much thought to the Shire Reckoning. It's just sort of there in the background, right? A quaint little detail that adds color to the hobbits' world. But here's the thing: the Shire Reckoning is actually a crucial part of how Tolkien tells his story. It's the timetable on which we experience the events of The Lord of the Rings.

You will recall that in Tolkien's sub creation, he uses the Red Book of the Westmarch as a framing device — an in‑world manuscript that lets the Hobbits themselves be the storytellers of this EPIC tale of the Third Age of Middle-earth. This is done 1. Because it's a sequel to The Hobbit, so we get more Bilbo Baggins - BTW, took me a minute to accept Frodo on my first reading. 2. Because it's a relatable way to talk about characters who live for hundreds or thousands of years and are a bit incomprehensible. Hobbits are everyman, and are so relatable. We see Elves through them. We see Mair through them, the angelic world creation beings like Gandlaf, Sauron, Sauruman and Melkor — and Ungoliant and Balrogs if you want to make an argument about it.

Shire Reckoning is a calendar that feels cozy, in other words. It's a calendar that reflects the hobbits' love of simplicity and comfort and good tilled earth. And by framing The Lord of the Rings around the Shire Reckoning, Tolkien is grounding his epic tale in those humble, homey values. He's saying, "Yes, we're going on this grand adventure - but we're going to see it through the eyes of the little people. Through the eyes of the hobbits and their Shire-centric way of marking time."

But here's where things get extra interesting. Because the Shire Reckoning isn't the only calendar in The Lord of the Rings. Far from it. As the story unfolds, we start to get hints and glimpses of other ways of reckoning time in Middle-earth. Older, more ancient systems that hearken back to the great kingdoms and cultures of the past.

Since we're creeping up on the New Year ourselves, it's worth spending a minute on how the hobbits mark theirs.

The Shire calendar is beautifully practical - twelve months, thirty days each. Every month lines up neatly with the phases of the moon. That makes it much more regular than our messy Gregorian calendar, with its whole "thirty days hath September" guessing game. The hobbits liked their schedules steady and predictable. In fact, it's one of the few calendars where every date falls on the same day of the week every single year. So, if your birthday's on a Friday this year - bad news if you don't like Fridays - it's always on a Friday.

The hobbits divide their year with a few extra festival days that don't belong to any month. The year begins with 1 Afteryule, but before that, you have Yule 1 and Yule 2 - their equivalent of New Year's Eve and New Year's Day, the turning of the year. Halfway through the calendar, you get Lithe (LYTH) days - midsummer holidays packed with feasting, games, and more than a little beer. And in leap years, there's an extra Overlithe, because hobbits are the kind of people who would absolutely turn an extra day into another excuse for a party.

The result is a system that perfectly reflects hobbit values: constant in its rhythm, but always anchored around moments of community, food, and celebration. Even their reckoning of time carries that sense of contentment and order - a kind of quiet defiance against the chaos of the larger world.

So the Shire Reckoning is, at its heart, a hobbit's calendar. It's a way of marking time that's tied to the rhythms of the Shire - to the planting and harvesting of crops, to the changing of the seasons, to the ebb and flow of hobbit life. In the Shire, years are measured in "Shire-years," which are roughly equivalent to our years. But the hobbits also have their own names for the months, names that evoke the natural world they love so much. Names like "Afteryule" and "Solmath" and "Astron" and "Halimath" or the harvest (September) and Winterfilth, Oct. after the harvest.

Our own months, incidentally, are named after Roman names.
June – Named for Juno, queen of the Roman gods and goddess of marriage and childbirth.

• July – Originally called Quintilis (the fifth month in the old Roman calendar) but renamed in honor of Julius Caesar.
• October – Comes from octo, meaning “eight” in Latin, because it used to be the eighth month before January and February were added to the front of the Roman year.
  So, our modern month names are basically a mash‑up of Roman gods, emperors, and leftover numbering that doesn’t even match up anymore. A nice, slightly chaotic contrast to the hobbits’ earthy, season‑based naming.
  
  Foreyule - or December was before YULE. Yule was the last day of the year, not part of any month, then another Yule for the first day of the year, outside of any month and then we are back to January, called Afteryule.

Now, to really appreciate how clever the Shire calendar is, it helps to remember how ours works - or, depending on your mood, how it doesn't. The calendar most of us live by is called the Gregorian calendar. It's been in use since the 1500s, when Pope Gregory XIII decided to fix some of the drift from the old Julian one. We've got twelve months that don't divide evenly - some with 30 days, some with 31, and one February that just gets greedy every four years and grabs an extra day. And because the math doesn't line up perfectly with Earth's orbit, our calendar slowly drifts unless we keep patching it with leap years.

And before you think a non‑Gregorian calendar is just a quaint hobbit thing, there are still places on Earth where folks follow different clocks entirely. In Ethiopia, for example, the days, months, and even the year itself tick differently. Their calendar has 13 months - twelve with thirty days each, plus a short thirteenth month of five or six days - and they're about seven or eight years behind the Gregorian year most of us use. Their New Year hits in September, right when our calendars are starting to look tired.

And they're not alone. Nepal runs on the Bikram Sambat calendar, Israel on the Hebrew one for religious life, Iran and Afghanistan on the SOH-lahr HEE-jree, and much of the Islamic world still keeps the Hijri lunar calendar for rituals like Ramadan. Even China ties its big cultural celebrations to the traditional lunisolar calendar. Humanity's got a lot of ways to keep time - Tolkien's hobbits were in good company.

Compared to that? The Shire Reckoning feels… smooth. Every month exactly thirty days, no wild swings, no rhyme‑and‑rhythm breaking. It's tidy, predictable, and very hobbit-like. You always know where you stand, and when the next festival is coming.

12 months, all 30 days, plus 5 festival days that aren't in ANY month, and like our leap years, every four years six festival days.

Lets look at the Númenóreans, for example, who once ruled a mighty island kingdom in the midst of the sea. The Númenóreans had their own calendar, one that was tied to the cycles of the stars and the moon. It was a calendar that reflected their greatness and their wisdom - but also their pride, their sense that they were somehow above the rest of Middle-earth, somehow exempt from the normal flow of time.

the Shire-reckoning Year 1 corresponded to T.A. 1601: the year that colonization of the Shire began by the Bree-hobbits Marcho and Blanco. Therefore, years of the Third Age can be converted to Shire-years by subtracting 1600.[2] Bree (I think) 1300.

The last year of the Third Age was year S.R. 1421. In the New Reckoning of King Elessar, the year Fo.A. 1 began on March 25, old style. The Hobbits mostly ignored the change and so for them the first year of the Fourth Age was just S.R. 1422.

When the Hobbits were still a wandering people, their calendaric unit was not a 'week', but a 'month', governed more or less by the Moon. In their old calendar, the new year began after harvest. This can be seen in the name of the month Winterfilth meaning "filling (of the year) before winter".

And then there are the Elves, the Firstborn, the ones who had been around since the very dawn of the world. The Elves had their own way of reckoning time too - one that was far more fluid and flexible than anything the mortals of Middle-earth used. For the Elves, time was a river that could be stepped into and out of, sort of.

And so, as The Lord of the Rings unfolds, we start to see these other calendars peeking through the cracks. We start to get a sense of just how deep the history of Middle-earth really is - and how the events we're witnessing are just one small part of a much grander tapestry.

And that, I think, is one of the key reasons why Tolkien's work endures. Why people are willing to pay such staggering sums for a piece of that legacy. Because when you enter Middle-earth, you're not just getting a single story. You're getting an entire world - a world with its own history, its own mythology, its own ways of marking and measuring time.

And that's something truly special. That's something worth treasuring.

Now, as we head off into 2026, a year that at least to me seems fraught with peril, perhaps it's more important than ever to value our stories and the battles, the internal battles, of good vs. evil. If you find value in this podcast, I would of course appreciate if you subscribe to it on whatever platform is your favorite, but also that you tell just one other person that you found value here and recommend they give it a try. Organic word of mouth is the best way to spread the word. 

I want to wish all a Happy New Year. My name is Larry Curtis, and you've been listening to the Tolkien podcast.