Time is on my side

One thing that always bothered me in Tolkien was the fact that in this far away world ( yes, I know Middle Earth is the direct translation for Midgard, which was the Old Norse word for the world of men, so it's not like Tattooine or anything) they still somehow used the Gregorian calendar.

And I don't simply mean that Tolkien used a 365 day year. No, he literally used the calendar on his wall. This is why every year on September 22 people celebrate the birthdays of Bilbo and Frodo. Middle Earth runs on a 24 hour a day, 7 day a week, 12 month a year calendar.

It seemed strange to me that he did this considering that the man made up enough backstory to his works that he knew the names of Bilbo's great grandfather and Pippins fathers uncles best friends former roommate. Why did he leave the calendar completely unaltered from the modern calendar.

So, in building the world of my story, I've been thinking about developing a new calendar. Nothing strange like the nonsensical calendars of the Star Wars Universe that have something like 10 months and then some weird holiday week and so forth. Just a set calendar that isn't the one you'd find in your kitchen.

Now, doing this has presented me with a couple of problems.



First is that the readers have to be able to understand this calendar without me giving them a chapter or an appendix to explain it. Who really wants to sit and read about how a world developed a calendar, how many months it has and how many days in each month.

Not me. I'd skip that stuff and find the next time I saw people doing things and start reading there.

The second problem is making this calendar intuitive enough that people can keep it in mind once you've dropped the info on them. Can't have readers read through whatever brisk calender explanation I can manage to slip into the story, and then two chapters later go "Wait... what day of the week is Viday?"

Here's the question though: Do I actually need it?

The rationale to me is "What if Seren or Danya needs to say to someone 'I'll talk to you on Thursday'?". I can't be so stupidly vague that I have them say 'I'll talk to you in 4 days' that seems to awkward to me. No one actually talks like that.

The thing though is that Brandon Sanderson never once mentions the name of a day or month in all of the Mistborn Trilogy, and, though I haven't read the books, I don't recall a single month or day name in season 1 of Game of Thrones. Somehow they've managed to do it, so perhaps there's a way for me to do it.

Either way, the last thing I want to do is to throw in an appendix just to explain things. I absolutely hated it when there needed to be a dictionary in Dune. Tolkein's appendix was basically him infodumping all of his world building and, while it was interesting, it was also ultimately unnecessary.

I'm not sure what way I'll go on this. I've got the months worked up, and I'm working on the days. Whether I'll use them is another story entirely.