The Shire-Reckoning

Welcome!

This site organizes the events of The Lord of the Rings by the date on which they occurred. This research is the foundation of two Twitter accounts that tweet the events of The Lord of the Rings on the same calendar dates that they occurred:

@ShireReckoning
@ShireReckoningW

• Archive of Entries — An entire one-and-a-half year Shire calendar covering the War of the Ring features a clickable link on each date with an event, starting on the day Gandalf visited Hobbiton to reveal to Frodo the identity of the Ring and ending with the Battle of Bywater in the Shire.
• Design of the Shire Calendar — How can every month of the Hobbit calendar have 30 days, when the number of days in a year isn’t a multiple of 30? This guide to the Hobbit calendar draws on material from The Lord of the Rings especially its appendices.
• Questions and Answers (FAQ) — A few non-narrative aspects of this site and its design are tackled and explained.
• Phases of the Moon — An extended treatise on why Moon phases in The Lord of the Rings are impossible to reconcile with the Moon’s schedule: because Tolkien tried to use the Moon phases from a modern calendar, but was unaware of the difference between the common use of the phrase “New Moon” versus what a calendar or almanac means by it. This made it difficult to display a little Moon icon with the correct phase next to each date in the Shire Calendar, but with an artificial adjustment the Moon was forced to match the text.