Hello and welcome back to the blog in 2022! Today I want to talk about the Heathen calendar, reconstructed/interpreted from the Primstav or Runic Calendar. The Primstav is actually a historical piece we’ve found that showed how people tracked time in old Germanic/Scandinavian regions, it’s pretty cool if you think about it, or at least I think so.
Why do I want to talk about it? Part of getting myself, and my bullet journal, ready for 2022 was to set up my heathen calendar events in the new FiloFax Notebook monthly inserts I’d purchased, so I thought I’d take y’all through it on the first day of the month Þorri.
Primstav
A Primstav or Rune Calendar is a wooden stick that serves as a calendar which uses 2 sides. One side represents winter and the other summer. Yep, Spring and Autumn still happened of course, but they weren’t as impactful to the Northern people as Summer and Winter. Each side is marked with stripes that represent individual days of the year. Every day that marks a holiday or other important day then got a special mark, often a little symbol to represent it. On the one pictured above, every 7th day of the week is marked with a cross according to the museum website.
As you can see there are quite a few special markers added to the one side pictured. These are a mix of holy or saint days, seasonal events, historical dates (such as hero celebrations) and other holidays. These were things that occupied the lives of the people that used it in their homes and would help them track time, especially useful for farmers whom would track when it was time to sow or harvest their particular crop. Another part of this, and this is particularly influential in the Northern European regions, is that depending on the season there is a drastic difference in the amount of daylight available, which in turn affects daily life. As you will see in the next bit I talk about, Summer and Winter were essentially called the “nightless days” and the “short days”.
Icelandic Calendar
The Old Icelandic Calendar is one of the better examples from the research I’ve done. This particular calendar is said to have been developed in the 10th century, based on a solar year, inspired by the Julian Calendar. The year was essentially split in two parts, Summer or Náttleysi (nightless days) and Winter or Skammdegi (short days). The year had 12 months of 30 days each, similarly to our current calendar and thanks to that it becomes somewhat easy to track it alongside our own.
Another interesting thing is that each month in this calendar has it’s own starting day of the week. Þorri (the current month) for example would always start on a Friday, like it does today, the 14th of January 2022.
The months on this calendar are named as follows:
| Month | Meaning | Weekday | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Skammdegi | Short Days / Winter | ||
| 1. Gormánuður | Slaughter month or Gór’s month | Saturday | mid Oct – mid Nov. |
| 2. Ýlir | Jól/Yule month | Monday | mid Nov – mid Dec |
| 3. Mörsugur | Fat sucking month | Wednesday | mid Dec – mid Jan |
| 4. Þorri | Frozen snow month / (God) Þorri’s month | Friday | mid Jan – mid Feb |
| 5. Góa | (Goddess) Góa’s month | Sunday | mid Feb – mid Mar |
| 6. Einmánuður | Lone or single month | Tuesday | mid Mar – mid Apr |
| Náttleysi | Nightless days / Summer | ||
| 1. Harpa | First summer month | Thursday | mid Apr – mid May |
| 2. Skerpla | Growth month | Saturday | mid May – mid Jun |
| 3. Sólmánuður | Sun month | Monday | mid Jun – mid Jul |
| 4. Heyannir | Hay season | Sunday | mid Jul – mid Aug |
| 5. Tvímánuður | Two months (left) | Tuesday | mid Aug – mid Sep |
| 6. Haustmánuður | Autumn month | Thursday | mid Sep – mid Oct |
Of course, different regions had different names for the months and such, but there is correlation between the various iterations, I included a link in the sources to a discussion of the Anglo-Saxon year.
My heathen calendar
When I initially worked on reconstructing my calendar I essentially had every month start on the 14th (except for February) for ease of integration with the modern calendars. For 2022 that meant half the months naturally started on their appropriate weekday according to the Icelandic Calendar. The ones that didn’t were often off by a single day. It was a bit tricky to construct the divisions though, some say it should be somewhere between 10/15th of the month, others somewhere at the end of the month. At the end of the day, this was a division that worked for me, but it’s not out of the question for it to change later as I flesh out my practice more.
Besides the names of months there are also holidays that happen in certain months, some specifically on the first day of the month, such as Þorrablót. It depends on your practice what holidays you’d likely include and I’ve seen a lot of variation on that end.
During my initial research I came across a lot of pages that incorporated the Wiccan wheel of the year or Christian holidays, which makes some sense if we look at the Christianization of Europe during the time the primstav was used as well as the influence of modern neo-pagan movements in the spiritual and heathen community. So, during that research I filtered out some supposed holidays that seemed more true to the heathen spirit for my own version of the calendar. Some of these correspond to the equinoxes and solstices or similar seasonal events, some are deity, ancestral or hero related days. I’m not saying these are 100% genuine holidays of the old days, but holidays don’t really serve a purpose without their context.
- Þorrablót – Start of Þorri
- Disting – 1st of February
- Góablót – Start of Góa
- Eostre – 21st of March
- Disablót – 1st of April
- Sigrblót – Start of Harpa
- Yggdrasil dagr – 22nd of April
- Walpurgis – 30th of April
- Friggablót – 20th of May
- Midsummarblót – 21st of June
- Freyrblót – 1st of August
- Haustblót – 23rd of September
- Álfarblót – Start of Gormánuður
- Vetrnaetr – 29th of October till 2nd of November
- Yuletide – 20th of December till 1st of January (Jól typically being on the first night/second day)
As to how I track these and the months in a way that works for me, I did a combination of 2 things.
- In my Google Calendar I made a new “calendar” purely to hold the heathen holidays and month changes. In this calendar I then made annual events that span the course of the month, titled as “Month: (…)”, as well as special days that I gave a different color. Because they are set to repeat annually I don’t have to worry about setting it up again and can make easy changes.
- I had gotten yearly and monthly inserts for my FiloFax Notebook, which I primarily use as a bullet journal. On these pages I marked the days the months change as well as the holidays. The inserts have little boxes where they show the main 4 phases of the moon, in those boxes I then marked my own symbols for the holidays, as one otherwise would on a primstav. (A picture of it is used on the top of the post.)
I do think it would be very fun to one day make a wooden primstav for myself, to hang on the wall in my home above a hearth or something. A little bit of functional decor. For now, this will do.
If you follow a heathen calendar, let me know! I’d love to see how its different or similar to my own and what choices you potentially had
Sources
Always share your sources, right? Perhaps we can help eachother learn this way!
Path of Ashes 