Arêndron Calendar

Division of the year

The Arêndron calendar is solar, like ours, so the length of the year is calculated to correspond as closely as possible to the tropical year. In fact the standard calendar year contains 366 days – it is the inverse of our calendar, with days being subtracted rather than added to reach the desired average year length.

The calendar fits well with the Arêndron base-30 counting system: its 366 days are divided into twelve months of 30 days, with six extra days, called hernâshan, inserted between the months. The hernâshan are all holidays and are the most important festivals of the Arêndron calendar.

The months of the year

The calendar is calculated so that the New Year coincides closely with the winter solstice. As the first refinement, years are grouped into cycles of eight, called ratjôlan; the fourth and eighth years of the cycle are complete, but the other six omit each of the six extra days in turn. The festivals associated with the extra days are, of course, not skipped but instead celebrated on the last day of the preceding month.

In addition, the eighth year of every fifteenth ratjol has a day subtracted by having the New Year Festival a day early, so the overall average year length is 365²⁹/₁₂₀ days.

Division of the month

Each month is divided into five weeks of six days. Six into thirty goes exactly, so every month begins on the same day; the six hernâshan are not assigned any day of the week. The six days are, in order: Braxinash, Mœzadash, Nuntarash, Hwusnash, Nargash, and Balnikash. Each day is sacred to one of the six major deities of the Arêndron religion; the last day, Balnikash, is sacred to Kailya, and is considered to be a day of rest.

The Arêndron people consider that one day ends and the next begins at sunrise, not at midnight as in our calendar.

Conversion between Arêndron and Gregorian dates

Atragam is of course a fictitious world, so there is no real sense in which their dates correspond to ours. However, to facilitate conversion (and especially to allow my readers to compute their Arêndron birth charts), I have arbitrarily decided that the first day of the first year of the Arêndron calendar, 1 Nirnha OA 1, corresponds to 21 December 1444 in the Gregorian calendar. (This is anachronistic, as the Gregorian calendar was not yet used in 1444, but sticking with Gregorian dates simplifies the calculation for dates in modern times.)

The following chart then shows the dates of the six hernâshan in the Gregorian years from 2005 through 2012:

Other dates may be determined by counting forwards or backwards from these. Thus, the nth day of any odd-numbered month is n days after the previous festival, while the nth day of any even-numbered month is (31 − n) days before the next festival. (Unless the next festival is one of those whose extra day is skipped – those marked with an asterisk in the table above – in which case a correction of one day must be made. Think of the festival as being the 30th day of the month, so the nth day is (30 − n) days before.)

Other years follow the same pattern as those above; add or subtract eight until the year number falls in the above range. In some periods there is an additional correction to be made, because the two calendars are not exactly synchronised with regard to leap years; the Arêndron calendar skips one leap year every 120 years, while the Gregorian skips three every 400 years. However, this correction is balanced out in the period from 22 December 1924 to 20 December 2044, which should cover the birth dates of most of my readers.

To find the year number when converting a date, add 1444 to the Arêndron year number, or subtract 1444 from the Gregorian. But since the new year does not start in the same date in the two calendars, for this purpose the last eleven days (21–31 December) of the Gregorian year count as belonging to the following year. (In other words, add one to the year number.)

Once you know the Arêndron date for any Gregorian date, finding the day of the week is easy: simply divide by six and note the remainder. A remainder of one indicates the first day, Braxinash, and so forth.

Ages

Before the introduction of the present calendar, the Urŋundran people used a lunar calendar, in which the month was the more important unit. This is not to say that people did not know about the cycle of the seasons, but for administrative purposes timespans were measured in months, and the next units above a month were the cargom (30 months or 2½ years) and the druntar (900 months or 75 years).

In Arêndron times the year was used for administration, but the tradition still survived of measuring people's ages in cargôm. Ages are always rounded down, so for instance an age of six cargôm is equivalent to from 15 to just under 17½ years.