Norse Months and Holidays
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- Опубліковано 3 бер 2020
- Our real surviving medieval sources are frustratingly silent about the calendar and holidays the Norse observed prior to the conversion to Christianity. This video looks at some of the most solid information we do have.
Jackson Crawford, Ph.D.: Sharing real expertise in Norse language and myth with people hungry to learn, free of both ivory tower elitism and the agendas of self-appointed gurus.
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Dr. Crawford, don't be alarmed but there appears to be a large T-Rex over your shoulder!
@@aerloman it scared me so I thought it was bigger than it was.
Is it true that no complete dinosaur skeleton has ever been found to date? Thanks!
It's very unlikely for a whole skeleton to remain intact for millions of years, because of scavengers, ground movements, and other factors. Reconstructions of ancient animals are almost always made of a collage of various specimens, and speculation for the remainder. However, this reconstruction and speculation is based on the very solid and reliable sciences of osteology and biomechanics.
correction, its a utahraptor!
Nerds!
When I lived outdoors using minimal artificial light sources, I knew what phase the moon was in subconsciously all the time
13:37 "If you are watching this on UA-cam on a laptop in 2020..."
I feel like historians think about these things a lot more than other people do.
I mean....for those of us with an active interest in the norse calendar, it seems like many of us want one so we know when to celebrate the old norse holidays (for various reasons) and the idea that each of us is now encouraged to pick what works for us and eyeball the dates as best we can is probably the most historically accurate practice anyway.
He seems like a wholesome fellow.
He surly does.
"Kornskurðarmánuðr"... That's one heck of a word.
widhbnw efDwdwDW cornharvestmonth is one heck of a word.
This is fascinating- it’s a great insight into the priorities of a mainly farming culture. It might not be a calendar like the modern ones but it is still a calendar, marking all the important points in time for people using it.
The division of the year into winter and summer is something also found in Celtic cultures. Many Celtic cultures including that of Ireland conceived of the year as having a “dark half” and a “light half”, with the dark half coming first. What is known as Samhain in Irish, the origin of Halloween, is actually the end of the Celtic year/beginning of the new year. Julius Caesar wrote of the continental Celts in The Gallic Wars that they also recorded the days as following nights. I believe the Irish “calendar” had less of an emphasis on lunar aspects and was more solar, but other than these differences I think this is an illustration of how deeply related Celtic and Germanic cultures are.
To be honest all of this was helpful. I don´t particularly want to know this as a way to call time keeping for old dates and times. I think it's more interesting to see how activities and agriculture shaped and was tracked by the moons.
Except that Iceland ran on moons rather than modern calendar months, it is very similar to a late medieval Book of Hours, such as that of Jean, Duc de Berry. The texts in those books laid out holy days, fast days, etc but the months were still very much associated with the agricultural activities, as shown in the illuminations in the headers. Haymaking, hunting, slaughtering, wine making, ploughing, sowing, etc all occur on the same month, no matter which book you look at.
Grimfrost does sell a Norse calendar (sort of), it's informative about traditions and holidays but I do always keep in mind that almost nothing's for sure.
Just got my Wanderer's Havamal, and I am so excited. It's absolutely beautiful. Thank you so much for your hard work, Dr. Crawford.
This is wild speculation, but:
One thing you see in the sagas is people arriving at someone's homestead and staying "for the winter". Presumably because winter travel in medieval Iceland would have been hell.
So might it be that the month around march-april was "the lone month" because that's around when it became feasible to travel again, and any winter lodgers you'd had would be leaving, but it could still be weeks, or indeed a month, before your own family returned?
That sounds very interesting and plausible. After reading Iceland Sagas, I also remember that it was customary to stay as a guest on a farm (mainly kinship) for weeks during the winter season or on public holidays. The right to stay over the winter was an unwritten law, as under the law it would be tantamount to murder to send someone out into the harsh winter night (in Iceland, a winter night lasts longer than a normal night - it lasts weeks). Although, to be precise,
'Right' ist not quite right as a term, it was more of a moral obligation that people followed - out of reason. I also read that the farmers helped each other out with fodder, this was also such a 'law' - a law commanded by good sense and reason, which is of course understandable, given the low population density, every human life was worth protecting. Except for criminals, they weren't treated squeamishly. Actually, this obligation to help each other out has lasted for a long time, especially in rural areas - even here in the Alps, some of them still exist. Because almost no one is dependent on the other (the 'manpower' - literally), many have forgotten what used to be essential.
As being a hindu i can understand this concept, we still use lunar calendar for our festivals, marriages and almost everything.
The old ways are still alive 😂 today, Thank you
Of note: The Norse used a Lunisolar system based on the phases of the moon, while the Icelanders like Snorri used a purely Solar system of 364 days split into twelve 30 day months (and an extra 4 day period in midsummer).
The Icelandic civil calendar was made in 930AD so everyone would use the same system. But since the true length of a year 365.25 days, in 960 the calendar had moved a whole month forward so an Icelandic astrologist called Þorsteinn surtur added an extra week to midsummer during leap years and to correct the calendar they doubled the length of that year's harvesting month (Kornskurðarmánuðr). That's why it's commonly called Tvímánuðr (doublemonth).
Honestly, this was way more interesting than anything you could hang on a wall
You have the talent of saying "we don't know" to then proceed explaining we know quite a bit.
9:48: Stekkr - the word stekk, with the same meaning, is still used in some Norwegian dialects today.
I'm here actually to learn about the historical basis for the Norse holidays and this video helped me a lot. Thank you for these valuable insights and information.
I could obviously be very wrong, but my guess is that most who want some kind of calendar don’t mean some Norse equivalent to our 12 month calendar with names and dates. But instead I’m guessing they want something like a pre-Christian Norse liturgical type calendar.
Though I may be thinking that because that’s what I, and many other Norse pagans, want. Haha! But I’ve also never heard anyone express an interest in something like an equivalent 12 month calendar. 🤷♂️
We used "räpparäkning" to count time before the industrial age in Sweden. I don't know if that can be traced back to the viking age or beyond. It consisted of 4 räppar, with 4 "räppardagar" (Yule day, Feast of the Annunciation, midsummer's day and Michaelmas) where every räppe had 13 weeks (ie 52 weeks a year). You counted the weeks backwards from the räppardag. E.g. wednesday the 13th week of Yule-räppe was the first wednesday after Michaelmas and the 1st week of Feast of the Annunciation-räppe was the week of midsummer's day.
Nine moons before Yule and Christ's birthday - that should have been easy to make a point of, as nine pregnancy months, as we here calculate with 3 and 4, also 9 and 12. That simple math must have been useful in beading and weaving, too, and a human delight in patterns and regularity.
In which part of Sweden did you encounter "räpparäkning"? It was a nice new information for me.
There's a lot of information to be taken from neighboring Germanic people's like the Franks who wrote down some of their pre-christian Reckoning of time, and Bede writes the English calendar down in his work, "De Temporum Ratione" both cases are also lunar based months, so likely similar. The Runic calendars, which appear in the 13th century and onward (mostly in Sweden), record lunar months, but more specifically, is metonic, as in a 19 year cycle with leap months, exactly the way Bede describes the Anglo-saxon calendar in "De Temporum Ratione", which indicates that a metonic cycle of reckoning was probably Pan Germanic, especially since the few mentions of the Gothic calendar (Eastern germanic tribes) has some of the same names for months as the Ænglisc, and is therefore, likely very similar. For those wondering, I believe it's roughly 11th day of Hrēðmónað according to Ænglisc reckoning.
As always, exceptionally informative and interesting -- particularly as I love learning how people reckoned time. Thank you. And I particularly love the place you're recording this at -- I am picturing me making my way there and having lunch sitting on that rock.
This has been very useful; thanks so much! I've been trying to work these out.
This is a great explanation
Hat off to you Sir 🎯
You have the best info. I wish I could take your class. Are you out of Utah? It’s beautiful wherever you are. Thank you for all the time you take for this.
March 17th looks really good!
Sorry for being off-topic, but I just watched an interview over at History Buffs with some of the show runners behind History Channel's Vikings. They also talk about old Norse and language reconstruction there and I was wondering if you would be interested in listening to it and maybe sharing your thoughts?
I would love to see a video about water Lore. You mentioned women turning into seals. Etc. That would be cool.
I understand that Dr. Jackson doesn't read the comments, but it thought it would be worth saying that this is a great video on this subject. Even though I don't know much about the Norse calendar, I know more than I should about calendars in general. For example, the venerable Bede has a succinct explanation of the Anglo-Saxon month names, and it's interesting that Solmonath roughly corresponds to February in Old English but June in Old Norse. This may be a point in favor of explaining the name as meaning "mud month" as opposed to "soul month," since the most notably muddy time of year would vary geographically (though I don't know if this matches the actual muddiest times of year in England or Jutland versus Norway or Iceland). The ancient Greeks had different calendars for each city, and, in many cases, month names were more or less the same but in different orders. Originally, the Roman calendar had only ten months (lunar months roughly corresponding to March through December), and this makes sense if you consider the problem of reconciling the solar year (365.2422 days) with the lunar month (29.530588 days). Most ancient peoples found it impossible to do this by calculation (the simplest long-term system is a 19 year cycle in which 7 of the 19 years have an additional thirteenth month), and the easiest thing to do would be to take an astronomical event, like the rising of the sun or a particular star in relation to a particular geographic feature), and apply a rule that the first new moon of the year would be the first new moon after that event. Megalithic structures with astronomical features (such as the sun rising over a particular feature on a certain day of the year) would facilitate this kind of reckoning, and it's notable that some Native American tribes had similar structures (less impressive architecturally, but similar in the astronomic sense) which are today referred to as medicine wheels. If a calendar-determining astronomical event were observed by a group, then the members of the group would be able to keep track of the days of the coming year in terms of lunar months by counting alternate 30- and 29-day periods. Each group, of course, would have a slightly different count, because they would have participated in a different annual astronomical observation. I strongly suspect that systems like this were widely used before the broad dissemination of modern-style calendars.
Replaced "Good thinking. Good scepticism. And all the very best" with "Happy painting, and God Bless" in my head, followed by the zoom in on what might as well be a Bob Ross painting. Colorado looks beautiful.
A Blue Moon is the fourth of three in a season. It is the only moon in the month. It can only occur 19-24 February, May, August and November. In the 1930s there was a mistake made about the second moon and it has been compounded ever since. There is no such thing as a second moon inside a moon or a second moon inside a month.
What are the "moving days" in regards to? Is it just the literal allotted days for the moving from one household to another? Or is it actually a holiday?
They must have has a way to determine when to assemble the thing. I wonder if it started at a new moon or a full moon.
What do you make of the weekly "deity days"? Woden's day, Thors day, Frigg's day? Would you suppose that other deities are missing from this weekly scheme?
Their isn’t any missing deities. It’s a Anglo Saxon god thing and they worshipped Saturn(thanks to the romans). Also I think this was a idea after the romans came into the picture. Make what you want of that
Dr. Crawford, Could Einmؘánuðr mean “First Moon” i/o “Lone” or “One Moon”. It would make sense to me that the beginning of a year would start at summer for an agrarian society as a renewal period easily discernible after the equinox. Or is there another word for ‘first’ which is why you wouldn’t think so?
Do we have any info on how they corrected the difference between the lunar calendar and solar year. Any evidence of a leap month or intercalary days?
It's interesting to note that a lot of civilizations used lunar calendars. In fact, I feel like of the examples I know, more might be lunar than not. Usually, the equinoxes and solstices are the other major players, so it's not terribly surprising to see them show up here.
EDIT: Personally, this is exactly the kind of information I was interested in when I came to see this video!
Dr. Crawford, do you know anything about a 13 month system or if such a thing may have been utilized? Considering those unlucky properties and stigmas are usually not in play with older society. I've heard about this somewhere and I'm interested in your take. Thanks
A solar year contains about 12.368 lunar months, so 12 is definitely a better approximation than 13.
@@Mr.Nichan I have heard about a 13 month system though. It might curtail breaking up the days more in a particular way. Thoughts?
It's based on counting the number of full moons from solstice to solstice. Every few years there will be 13 rather than 12.
@@VeracityTrigger The calendar of the Roman Republic before the Julian reform sometimes inserted a leap month. Maybe that's what you were thinking of? Apparently, the priesthood charged with it lost track, and it got so bad harvest festivals were celebrated in the middle of winter.
@@VeracityTrigger I thought I remembered systems where there were days outside of any month every year. If those were all together, they could be considered a short "13th month".
I know that the Mayan Haab' calendar divided the year into eighteen 20-day "months" and added 5 unlucky days, but I don't think those days were together. I thought I remembered that the Romans once had like a 2-week festival that wasn't in any month, at least on certain years, but I can't find any evidence of that whatsoever. (I didn't try very hard, though.)
I laughed way too hard at Anno Thori.
I wonder if they operated with som common events. Fx the period of a kings reign or “the year after the great drought” or something?
Very interesting. One possible explanation for the name Einmánuður, and Tvímánuður. Einmánuður could be explained as meaning one month until summer (which begins still in Iceland on the first day of Harpa (Sumardagurinn fyrsti) a public holiday) and Tvímánuður = two months too winter. First day of winter - Saturday - is not celebrated for obvious reasons.
According to another comment, Tvímánuður is so named because it was doubled in certain years (like leap years) after 960 as a way to keep the months from shifting around, and (I guess) still use lunar months. I have no idea whether this is true, though.
@@Mr.Nichan I think that comment is confusing tvímánuður with the Sumarauki ("the summer added week") which according to Ari the learned (Ari fróði) was added around that time, 960, because people where beginning to notice a shift in the calander, the Althingi (Alþingi) was always meeting later in the year, or closer to midsummer. So one week was added every seventh year, to correct this shift. Therefore I must disagree with professor Crawford that there was no calander, but of course there was no universal calander, but in this case a local calander for Iceland; as it was very important that people met at the Alþingi every year on the same day. The lawspeaker (lögsögumaður) had to make announcements concerning the calander at the althingi to keep it in line.
I find it really interesting that we have a shared word for 'month', thus early Germanic people observed months. However specific month names differ a lot. Could it be there once were specific names and they changed or even some had formed right before Germanic expansion and others were filled in seperately. Maybe they'd just say first month, second month, third month and then harvest month at some point. Hm.
to be fair, we have said that there is 365.25 days in a year, and then bundled up all the 0.25 and created an extra day every four years.
Thank the Great Architect of the Universe that there is someone who is interested in getting it Wright instead of regurgitating prepetual BS.
The orbit of our planet around the sun isn't circular, it's elliptical. So the "shortest day" actually starts on the 17th of December. 9 hours 5 minutes (By the way the 17th is Saturnalia.) this lasts until the 25th of December.
I have seen folk saying that Yule was on the full moon after the Winter Solstice, rather than over the Winter Solstice I was wondering which is correct?
So since it is a lunar calendar, could you possibly align more closely to the Julian calendar? Obviously not lined up, but simply closer.
11:11 "Nid" also means atrocity.
Could it be, that this "einmanudr" is "one" because it was - at least I got the impression it was - the first summer month (or even the first month of the year).
I’m wondering if the Norse had named the planets for gods like the Romans did? But they had a five day week? So maybe they didn’t count the moon and sun as planets? 🤔
Perhaps the fact that the christian calendar was extremely detailed is what made it popular in the nordic countries (as well as many other parts of the world)?
Where can I find Norse books for young children?
I’m having a heck of a time finding anything.
Very true. The Gregorian and Julian calendars were Roman inventions. The old Norse just didn't invent an equivalent to the calendar. They only acquired the Roman calendar through their conversion to Christianity.
thank you for your hard work which you have generously chosen to share with us, this has sparked some debate among people who i know online. i really like the list of further resources which you have come up with here too. i am having some problems with the video here. there was a lot of blurring right at the very beginning, luckily this later cleared up. the volume on the video appears to have dropped from that on a previous video which i was watching, where the sound was perfectly clear. I don't know why that was, it still seems unusually quiet now. i am straining to here some of what you are saying, which has not been the case with previous videos. this loss of sound was at its worst right near the end, where the volume dropped off to nearly nothing. i was just about able to catch some of your discussion about the lack of a viking calendar at least i am guessing that that was what you were trying to say?
i find it funny. hes interested in the old west, pre christian scandinavia (and language), guns, and cowboy hats, similar ideals in nature, and has shown to be a fan us such shows as "red green"..the exact same things i am intersted in XD i wonder if there is a certain correlation between personality traits that lead people toward similar interests, or if you could guess peoples interests (even if vaguely related, or unrelated) based on knowledge of some of their known interests, and specifically, how "many miles" per se, you could get out of that kind of technique.
We decorate with and dress children up as goat bucks in yule today and historically in Norway. Could have connection with name Hrútmánuđr? Certainly no Christian connection ;)
And we make bucks out of straw in Sweden as Christmas decorations, they supposedly scare off evil spirits...!
@@HenrikBergpianorganist Yes we do that here as well. In my childhood I was told it was connected to 'De tre bukkene bruse' fairy tale, and we used to perform that in Christmas. That fairy tale is also very little Christian.
@@HenrikBergpianorganist Personally I think it is connected to Thor's bucks, but all this may be connected to each other anyway.
Oh, I never heard that story in connection to Christmas here, even though we have the same story!
anno þóri, love that.... xD
Primstav?
Or is that a later invention?
If the "Vikings" had known about Christian Canonical Hours and the Calendar of Saints, they'd still be worshipping Thor. Talk about overloaded.
You could still create a calendar every year using the new moons.
Did he just ask me out on a date for November 2nd?olol
The four seasons are likely a Christian or Roman influence. In the first century AD the Roman author Tacitus notes that the Germanic people only understand and have words for three seasons: winter, spring and summer ("hiems et uer et aestas intellectum ac uocabula habent, autumni perinde nomen ac bona ignorantur"). This makes sense even today, since winter, spring and summer have their own names, whereas "haust", autumn, is simply the word for harvest.
You didn't mention the runic calendars, extensively used since the late middle ages until fairly recent. It's not unthinkable that they have a pre-Christian origin, but without archaeological evidence, we might never know.
April fools! But you still have my vote.
How you resist the urge to carve runes on all those trees is beyond me, 'cause I gotta tell ya, the temptation would be just awful. Btw, thanks for your dedication to these videos.
As a modern day heathen I find this very fascinating and look at this when to have a feast or get together for a good drink and gathering with my brothers and sisters
Wait but like some of this doesn’t make sense. The week was adopted from the romans, who predate the Viking period...I thought that was why we have Tuesday (Tyr’s day), Wednesday (Woden’s - Odin - day), Thursday (Thor’s day.), and Friday (Frigg And/or Freyja’s day). So are you talking about earlier...? I mean I feel like by the time the viking age rolled around they were using the julian calendar; especially if their names for days managed to stick well enough to make it to present day english. But if that's not the case, why did those day names end up in our language?
The days of the week are Roman origin, just adapted to Germanic gods instead of Roman ones (Saturn stuck though), and the English days of the week are named after the Anglo-saxon gods, not Norse gods, (though very close cousins) so the practice was well established before the Viking age. The Icelandic Calendar, which is sort of a transitional calendar was introduced in the tenth century, when the Viking age was well underway, suggesting that the calendar lasted up until this point in Scandinavia. Further, the Runic calendars found in Sweden in the 13th century follow a lunar-solar system, and have days of the week, suggesting that this calendar system probably persisted well after christianization, at least in rural areas.
I know that the Futhark runes were loosely adopted from a version Latin alphabet, so they might have adopted other practices during or before the Viking age.
@@hoonterofhoonters6588 the fuþark may have come from the phoenician alphabet, which is also where Greek came from, but nobody is really certain what the runes evolved from. The eldar fuþarc however, is at least two millennia old.
@@beorwinesheathencorner6425 Yeah, but you're not like...clearing up the confusion. I agree with all of that which is why I'm confused as to the reason he'd say they didn't really have a calendar system. Like for Tyr's day,, Odin's day, Thor's day, and Freyja's day to require old English words to begin with there was likely a reason - they were already dividing it up via units of a week (which would make sense, given that the Romans came up with that and it predates the settlement of Iceland by the Norse.) and already had day names. They just used whatever existing words they had for the norse gods. But like if the norse didn't have some kind of coherent calendar system I doubt we'd have ended up with 4 of the weekdays named after their gods. Unless he's talking about before contact with the Romans, in which case it makes more sense to say that they weren't really using a calendar.
@@kyidyl the days of the week was probably adopted when the Julian calendar was. Much like the 10th century Icelandic calendar being a modified Julian calendar, with Icelandic month names instead of Roman month names.
I think that we should still use a moon calendar.
Not disappointed, but I will point out that you did not answer a question you posed early in this video: If I wanted to say that I would meet you 'at some later time that is appox 2 weeks away' would I say, "I will meet you at the New Moon."? If I had a debt that I needed to pay off, would I agree, "I will pay this back by the next Althing."? If I were getting together a party to raid Ireland, would I tell you to "Meet me at the dock on the first day of summer. We sail two days later."? Real people need to do this sort of a thing. Please enlighten us further.
Voice pich is low
It becomes more and more apparent that the reasons Old Norse is practically untouched because it is sufficient.
I have heard several theories about the reason Icelandic has remained so similar, which include isolation, but such reasons do not cover reasons why terms like "harvest moon" have been adopted. I have thought it was the beauty of the language that preserved itself, because the people of Iceland were so poetic in speech or something. I remember hearing about a proof written in English about how superior English was as a language. Although, I have never read such a book, I suspect it praises the incorporation of the most succinct words from each culture, and there are so many (and why Norwegians tend to enjoy speaking English) Old Norse Words, I ignorantly suggest it is because the language (Old Norse) tends to call things as they ought to be called. Summed up:If it is not broken, it doesn't need to be fixed, and why reinvent the wheel?
Couldn't you then just celebrate those within those time gaps similar to hanukkah?
One issue is that, if you add a non-full-month amount of time to a lunar calendar to make it line up with the solar calendar, your lunar months will get off and no longer be new moon to new moon or whatever.