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
This site offers several related resources:
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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.
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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.
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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.
©2007–2020 Brandon Rhodes