The Calendar of Imladris: EXPLAINED

One of my favorite details from the Appendices of The Lord of the Rings has always been "The Calendars" detailed in Appendix D. As a teen in high school, I devoured this section of the book. I then applied the knowledge I gained by converting my locker calendars into the Elvish equivalent. I wrote all the Calendar of Imladris dates on the Cedco Lord of the Rings locker calendars 2001 through 2003. When they stopped making locker calendars, I designed my own in the archaic Paint program on my computer, using collages of LotR pictures for the headers. I continued this in college. See an original example below, which I recently unearthed in my old memory box!

My parents never questioned this obsession/hyper-focus. They did, however, draw the line when I asked to start celebrating Elvish holidays. (The Elvish New Year is right around my birthday anyway! It's not like it would have been HARD!!)

My fascination with the Elvish Calendar has never truly faded. I even began commissioning artwork in 2023 to hopefully produce a high-quality 6-season calendar I could sell to any crazy LotR fans like myself. (This project is now on hold, though 3 of the 6 art pieces are complete!) But now, I utilize my knowledge of the Elvish Calendar in my Elvish Letter Fellowship Club, where I essentially role-play as Tolkien Elves and write Elvish Calligraphy letters that are then sent all over the world each month for members of my Patreon to decode. Dates give a wonderful glimpse into the Timeline of Arda, providing added context to the letters I write!

Reading and understanding those dates can be a bit of a challenge if you don't first understand the layout of the Calendar of Imladris and how it compares to our Gregorian Calendar in real life. This blog post will hopefully shed light on this specific detail of Tolkien's world and how we can enjoy it as fans.

DISCLAIMER: As with much of Tolkien's world, the reckoning of time was an element that Tolkien shifted, revised, and revisited on and off throughout his lifetime. Within the framing of the legendarium, Tolkien was just a scholar doing his best to cobble together an understanding from long-lost resources on the matter... so inconsistencies abound and are inevitable. While I do my best to condense down what Tolkien provided, know that there are always layers of nuance and details beneath the surface that I might not cover here but have been the source of study for other clever individuals on the internet.

That said, let's get started!! In order to understand the differences between our calendar and the Elvish one, we need to look at the differences between units of measure. According to Tolkien in Appendix D, "the Eldar preferred to reckon in sixes and twelves as far as possible." Their calendar reflects this in several different ways. We'll start small and then work our way to larger units.

Days per Week:

As a quick primer, the Elvish word for "day" (as a cycle of the sun) is ré (Quenya) or aur (Sindarin). Once the Sun was a thing (at the literal dawn of the First Age in Beleriand), Elves measured days from sunset to sunset. Think of it this way: Elves, as the Firstborn Children of Ilúvatar, were born under the stars before the advent of the Sun and Moon. So once the Sun and Moon exist, their days begin when stars appear in the evening sky. It's almost like returning to their original perception of the world when they can spot the stars again in the dark.

In the Reckoning of Rivendell (aka the Calendar of Imladris), a "week"-—enquië (Quenya) or odlad (Sindarin)—is six days long. The Elves used this for ritualistic purposes rather than practical ones. After all, a week is the blink of an eye for such a long-lived race! This is our first instance of the six/twelve counting.

The six days in the Elvish week were named as follows:

• "Stars Day" – Elenya (Q) – Orgilion (S)
• "Sun Day" – Anarya (Q) – Oranor (S)
• "Moon Day" – Isilya (Q) – Orithil (S)
• "Two Trees Day" – Aldúya (Q) – Orgaladhad (S)
• "Heavens Day" – Menelya (Q) – Ormenel (S)
• "Valar/Powers Day" – Valanya (Q) – Orbelain (S)

Note on Holidays: In the Gregorian Calendar, holidays are always reckoned within this system of days-of-the-week. For example, Spring Equinox is March 19th or 20th and its day of the week fluctuates because the calendar is reckoned in continuous weeks. In the Calendar of Imladris, there are three holidays that behave the same way. They are considered outside the "months"/"seasons", but do not interrupt the flow of the weeks. These will come up again later when we talk about leap years. The three calendar holidays are:

• "First Day" – Yestarë (Q) – Iestor (S)
• "Middle Day / Days" – Enderë / Enderi (Q) – Enedhor / Enedhyr (S)
• "Last Day" – Mettarë (Q) – Methor (S)

Months/Seasons and their Weeks:

This is one place we drastically depart from the Gregorian Calendar. The Elves reckon their year in six seasons/months. These seasons are also two different lengths, with the winter and summer seasons longer than all the others. The short seasons are nine weeks long (aka 54 days), and the longer seasons are twelve weeks long (aka 72 days). Because weeks are six days long, all these numbers are multiples of six! Here are the names of each season along with the position of the holidays between them:

• "First Day" – Yestarë (Q) – Iestor (S) – 1 day
• 🌼 "Spring" – Tuilë (Q) – Ethuil (S) – 54 days
• ☀️ "Summer" – Lairë (Q) – Laer (S) – 72 days
• 🍇 "Autumn" – Yávië (Q) – Iavas (S) – 54 days
• "Middle Days" – Enderi (Q) – Enedhyr (S) – 3 days*
• 🍂 "Fading" – Quellë (Q) – Firith (S) – 54 days
• ❄️ "Winter" – Rhívë (Q) – Rhîw (S) – 72 days
• 🌱 "Stirring" – Coirë (Q) – Echuir (S) – 54 days
• "Last Day" – Mettarë (Q) – Methor (S) – 1 day

(The picture above is of my original high school Elvish Calendar I made for my locker circa 2003. Please note the error in that I counted the holidays outside the week structure, since it would throw off the satisfying visual of the solid blocks of the weeks for each season. The actual calendar would keep the weeks uninterrupted, so the 1st of each season wouldn't always be on the 1st day of the enquië/odlad.)

Solar Year vs Elvish Yén / În:

The next jump in units brings us to the "year". Now, if you add up all the numbers from the list above, you'll notice we end up with the familiar 365 days to a solar year. However! The Elves, being so long-lived, have a unit of measure that is even larger than a solar year.

A "solar year" or "growth cycle" is called a löa (Q) or lóran (S) in Elvish, and that's the equivalent to a "year" in our Gregorian calendar. This is the typical 365 day cycle we're used to. (We'll get to leap years in a moment.)

The next unit up for the Elves is the Yén (Q) or În (S), which confusingly translates to "year". This is an Elvish Year, though... which is equivalent to 144 löar / lórain. This is 12 x 12 = 144, so we're sticking with our multiples of six/twelve here. Typical Elves.

Breaking down a yén / în even further, it's equivalent to:

• 8,766 "weeks" / enquier / edlaid
• = 52,596 days

These weeks are reckoned continuously, just like in the Gregorian Calendar. (This is where my high school calendars are wrong, since I pulled the holidays outside the structure of the weeks. Oops! Younger me prioritized uniform rows and columns.) But if you're a math geek, you'll notice that 144 years x 365 days/year = 52,560 days. This means we're 36 days short of the number given for an "Elvish Year". And that's when we have to deal with...

Elvish Leap Years:

The way Elves handle leap year is a little different! In the Gregorian Calendar, we have a leap year every 4 years, and we add an extra day onto the end of February. The Elves, preferring their twelves, have a leap year every twelve years. On an Elvish Leap Year, they double the Enderi/Enedhyr. This means instead of a three-day festival in the middle of the year, the Elves have a six-day (aka 1 full "week") festival once every 12 years.

This ultimately adds 3 days every 12 solar-years, so 3 x 12 = 36 days added to the "Elvish Year". That's our missing 36 days from before! Huzzah!

Final Adjustments Across Ages:

Finally, the last bit about the Reckoning of Rivendell in Appendix D of The Lord of the Rings details that there would still be inaccuracy remaining when trying to match it with the modern calendar. In the existing framing within Tolkien's world, he has this as a note in the Red Book (likely added by Samwise):

"...in the 'Reckoning of Rivendell' the last year of every third yén was shortened by three days: the doubling of the three enderi due in that year was omitted..."

So... Every 12 years, the Elves have a Leap Year that doubles the Mid-Year Festival from 3 days to 6. But every 432 years, they skip that long festival and treat it like a normal year. This shaves off 3 days every 432 years.

To put it into perspective, this adjustment only happened six times the entirety of the Third Age in Middle-Earth. That Age was 3021 years long. Elves born at the start of the Third Age would still be considered in their "youth" by the end of the Age. So this longer blip in the calendar is more akin in their perception of time to our Gregorian leap year, which we would experience six times by the age of 27.

Application:

So now you know all the basics about how the Elves set up their calendar! But how do you apply this knowledge? Well, this is where things get a lot more complicated. Mapping the Calendar of Imladris overtop the Gregorian Calendar can be difficult because of all those Leap Year differences. Our Gregorian Leap Years don't match up perfectly to the Elvish ones, and we have no idea where we would be in that longer 432 year cycle either. There are plenty of nitty-gritty details we could cover to try to convert our modern dates into the Calendar of Imladris.

Personally, I'll leave that to the experts over at The Shire Reckoning Project. If you ever use their Middle-Earth Calendar Simulation Page, which I highly recommend, you'll notice they have at least TEN different ways of synchronizing the calendars. It's fascinating to read all of the caveats and minutiae involved in their project.

If you aren't interested in all those details, you can absolutely still use their Simulation Page to convert a date into the Elvish Calendar. Just leave their "Synchronize" settings on the default and enter the date you're looking for in the "Gregorian Date" section.

You can also use their Simulation Page to help get a general idea of the time of year of a certain date you might read in my ELF-Club letters! For example, in my very first letter, the date given at the top translates to 53rd of Ethuil ("Spring"). If you scroll through the calendar, you'll find that date is around May 18th, give or take a few days depending on the year. So in the northern hemisphere, that letter would have been written in late spring into early summer. The exact date typically won't matter too much in my letters, but it can give a bit of extra context just for some flavor!

If you would like to convert your regular wall calendar to the Calendar of Imladris, you can absolutely use the Simulation Page to find your current date and start notating the beginning and end of each Elvish "season" along with the important festivals at the start/end of each year and the longer celebration at the end of "Autumn" leading into "Fading". The Enderi/Enedhyr hover around the same time as Frodo and Bilbo's Birthday, September 22nd. So it's a great excuse to incorporate "Ring Day" or "Hobbit Day" into your calendar as an early start to the holiday season!