Wk. 2 Ch. 3 - Present and future skill

[Sparrow]

Thorin laments that it passes the dwarves' present skill to determine when Durin's Day will fall. Gandalf replies, "That remains to be seen." Is this an example of suspense? Foreshadowing? Does it indicate a greater force is at work or simply that Gandalf knows more than the others? Is this anticipation that the adventure will be lucky, or that the adventurers will grow in the process, or of something else?

[Desi Baggins]

From everything I have read about figuring when Durin's Day occurs I think that a greater force helped the dwarves and Bilbo arrive at the secret door right on time.

Here is the info I found at Encyclopedia of Arda:

Browse through Appendix D of The Lord of the Rings, and you'll discover in great detail how the calendars of Hobbits, Men and Elves worked. Strangely, though, Tolkien has nothing to say there about Dwarves: the only clues we have to their calendar are from Thorin's words quoted in The Hobbit.

As so often with Tolkien, though, we can deduce an awful lot from one sentence. It's clear that the Dwarves had a lunar calendar. Our modern calendar, and all those described in Appendix D, are solar calendars: they're based on the Sun's annual motion through the sky. There is an alternative, though: it's possible to design a calendar based on the phases of the moon, and the Dwarves must have used a calendar of this kind.

A lunar calendar works by breaking down time into periods of roughly four weeks, during which the moon changes from new to full to new again. This approach has one big advantage that solar calendars lack - the face of the moon acts like a gigantic 'sundial' marking out the passage of each 'lunar month'. You can see this in action in Sam's reaction after the Fellowship leave Lórien, and the Moon has an unexpected phase: 'either it's out of its running, or I'm all wrong in my reckoning' (The Fellowship of the Ring II 9 The Great River). Sam thinks of the moon in much the same way as a watch or clock, as have many peoples throughout history.

Regulating a calendar by the moon instead of the sun might be useful from one perspective, but it also has a big disadvantage. A lunar year (twelve lunar months) is only 354 days long: eleven days short of a solar year. For every solar year that passes, the calendar will 'slip' back by more than a week. This is much more than a technical inconvenience, because the passage of seasons follows the solar year, not the lunar. Any given date will 'shift' by six months every seventeen years or so - midsummer becomes midwinter in less than a generation.

The Dwarves seem to have taken a direct approach to this problem - they reset their calendar every single year. When Thorin says that their year starts on 'the first day of the last moon of Autumn', what he means is that the Dwarves find a point where the lunar and solar (seasonal) calendars coincide, and restart their calendar from that point.

Perhaps the most curious outcome of this is that Dwarvish years have a variable number of months, sometimes twelve, and sometimes thirteen. Tolkien doesn't mention this 'leap month' (which would occur quite often) directly, but it must have occurred2.

Another peculiarity of the Dwarves' calendar relates to Durin's Day itself. In most cases, only Dwarves at the right longitude will experience Durin's Day. A perfect example is the Durin's Day we know occurred in 2941 of the Third Age (the one described in The Hobbit). As with most Durin's Days (eclipses are an exception), the moon and sun can only be seen together in the early morning or late evening. Bilbo saw the crescent moon as the sun was setting over Erebor.

Erebor, though, is in the distant east of Middle-earth. At the time Bilbo was seeing 'a thin new moon above the rim of the Earth.' (The Hobbit 11, On the Doorstep), the Sun was still fairly high in the sky over the Blue Mountains, a thousand miles or more to the west. By the time the sun was low enough for the Dwarves in the Blue Mountains to see the moon, it would already have set! It was Durin's Day for the Dwarves at Erebor, then, but not for their cousins in the west.

We can hardly blame Thorin for saying 'it passes our skill in these days to guess when such a time will come again'! (The Hobbit 3, A Short Rest)
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*Everything we've said here follows unavoidably from Thorin's few comments in The Hobbit. What we can't say, of course, is whether Tolkien realized these astronomical consequences. He obviously had a very good understanding of how calendars work: the fictional calendars in Appendix D are beautifully constructed, and in some ways an improvement on our own. The ancient idea of exactly aligning a calendar with the solstices and equinoxes, for example, is the basis for many of Tolkien's calendars - the modern Gregorian system is 'out' by ten days or so.

It seems hard to believe that Tolkien would expend such effort on the development of calendars for Hobbits, Men and Elves, and yet forget the Dwarves completely. Perhaps he took a look at their calendar and decided it was too awkward to describe in detail, but if he did, he has left us no evidence.
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Notes
1 It isn't clear whether Durin's Day was observed by all Dwarves, or just by the Longbeards, the clan founded by Durin.
2 Tolkien may not detail the Dwarvish calendar directly, but there is some circumstantial evidence that he considered its operation. This comes from the Jewish calendar, which is also lunar in form, and is also regulated against the solar calendar by the frequent insertion of an extra month.
This is a more important point than it may at first appear, because Tolkien drew certain cultural and historical parallels between his fictional Khazâd and the Jewish peoples. It is known, for example, that the sounds of Khuzdul, the language of the Dwarves, were in part derived from Hebrew. Bearing this in mind, it's tempting to imagine that the Dwarves' lunar calendar might represent another of these parallels.

[Stormrider]

I think what Thorin meant as that there were no longer any Dwarves left who had knowledge of their calendar and their system. It is interesting information Desi found at the Encyclopedia of Arda about the Dwarves using a Lunar instead of a Solar system.

If the Dwarves sometimes had a 12 month or 13 month year and would reset according to the other solar calendars every year, that would also confuse the actual pinpointing of Durin's Day during the current year that Bilbo and the Dwarves found themselves.

So if the Dwarves with the knowledge of their lunar calendar had faded away and were no longer, Thorin and his group would not have had the skill to figure it out!

As far as foreshadowing, I think Gandalf, being a Maiar, had the knowledge to calculate the Dwarves Lunar Calendar system as well as any Solar Calendar system. Gandalf most likely knew that in the year the Dwarves were to set out that Durin's Day would occur about the time the Dwarves were expected to make it to the Lonely Mountain. Hopefully, they would all be sitting by that door just waiting for everything to fall into place.

[Andorinha]

RE: "Thorin laments that it passes the dwarves' present skill to determine when Durin's Day will fall. Gandalf replies, 'That remains to be seen.'"

Now, this has always bothered me. Just how/ why would the dwarves ever have lost the ability to determine their "New Year's Day," Durin's Day? Every society that keeps track of time's passage, since prehistoric days, has been able to figure when the calendar round should start anew. From Thorin's statement "it passes present skill to determine when Durin's Day will fall," apparently they used to be able to figure out the approach of this event with little or no trouble. So why do the dwarves lose this ability to tell when Durin's Day will next fall? The mathematically clever dwarves (engineering requires high math skills!) can still build some of Middle-earth's best roads, walls, bridges, tunnels and mines -- but suddenly can no longer do the math to find out when Durin's Day is due?

Apparently, as Elrond reads the Moon Letters, the dark, old thrush knows the date (by instinct? or by magic? or by doing the math himself?) and will "strike the correct hour" with his knocking of the snails. But with the combined skills of dwarves, wizard, Elven Lord and burglar, they cannot calculate the date for themselves? Hmm, wonder what old Tolkien was up to here?

Maybe he was trying to show that The Hobbit trek was "fated," or pre-destined to succeed, as it all works out just right in the end...

[Stormrider]

I was assuming that there were different sages among the Dwarves: those that kept their history, those that read the stars and kept the calendar, those that recorded births, deaths, weddings, those that could make tools, those that could mine, etc. After Smaug took over the mountain and ate or chased them all away, these sages were extinct or dwindling. I wouldn't think all Dwarves would know every bit of Dwarve skills.

But as you stated above, Andorinha, it does seem rather suspicious! Lacking a properly knowledgeable star/calendar Dwarve, you would think a few dwarves could have come close in determining the beginning and end of every season and make a near assumption when Durin's Day would fall each year.

Perhaps Tolkien didn't want to have the exact date obvious and had Thorin make that statement in order to make the point that it was a mystery that would need to unfold during the tale.

[Andorinha]

Hmmm... this is beginning to become quite a complex issue.

RE Stormrider's: "I was assuming that there were different sages among the Dwarves: those that kept their history, those that read the stars and kept the calendar, those that recorded births, deaths, weddings, those that could make tools, those that could mine, etc. After Smaug took over the mountain and ate or chased them all away, these sages were extinct or dwindling. I wouldn't think all Dwarves would know every bit of Dwarve skills."

OK, do we know it from The Hobbit itself, or is it a later LOTR, Quest of Erebor source that mentions Thorin and his Dwarves had long been living in the Blue Mountain Dwarf kingdoms west of the Shire? If this data comes only with LOTR/ QE, then we can drop it; but if The Hobbit, (original ed. or 1966 revision?) says that they were in the Blue Mountain communities, then these Dwarf delvings would probably be the ancient Belegost and Nogrod, neither of which would have had its society/ culture/ calendric sages disrupted by Smaug's sack of The Lonely Mountain. Right? Something as basic to society as figuring out the New Year Day, must have survived in these cities, surely? So there should have been the equivalent of Dwarf Calendars available in the Blue Mountain communities for Thorin and company to read?

LOL, maybe these cities used a different calendar and were not of Durin's House (the Longbeards, I think?), and so the refugee folk of Durin's tribe were allowed to settle in the Blue Mountains, but the local Dwarves (if they were of other houses than that of Durin) knew nothing about a Durin's Day?

[Andorinha]

I've done a bit of research on this, and apparently, from post Hobbit sources, and some of The Silmarillion material, Nogrod and Belegost were originally the citadels of two of the Seven Houses of the Dwarves: the Firebeard and Broadbeam clans. But both these dwarven citadels were destroyed when the Valar broke Morgoth and Beleriand sank beneath the waves. Apparently the Blue Mountains were swamped by Tsunamis. Some of the Firebeards and Broadbeams escaped, journeyed to Khazad-dum, and joined Durin's Folk there. Later, in the Second Age, some Dwarves (apparently of mixed Longbeards, Firebeards, and Broadbeams) returned to the old ruins and re-inhabited them; so the Dwarves of the Blue Mountains of Bilbo's era would probably have remained this mixed sort of group. Later, in the Third Age, a number of Dwarves, including the royalty of Durin's Kin, moved out east to settle The Lonely Mountain. Did all of the Longbeards make this trek, or did some, probably intermarried with Firebeards and Broadbeams, stay in The Blue Mountains?

It is further stated in the Encyclopaedia of Arda, that after the fall of Khazad-dum to the Balrog, the Dwarves of Durin moved first into the Blue Mountain communities: "More than six thousand years after the old citadels of the Dwarves had been lost, these wandering Dwarves of Durins' Folk, under King Thráin II, returned to the Ered Luin. The seat of their Kings only remained there for a generation - Thráin's son Thorin set out to recover the Lonely Mountain in the distant east - but for a time the hammers of the Dwarves rang again among the Blue Mountains, as they had in ancient days."

(www.glyphweb.com/arda/d/dwarvesofthebluemountains.html)

Consequently, I would think that these mixed Dwarves in Ered Luin, would have become quite familiar with Durin's Folk, and the Durin's Day celebration. So if the "calendar sages" of The Lonely Mountain had been all killed by Smaug, still, there should have been some of Durin's House left in The Blue Mountains, and they would have needed to determine Durin's Day each year for themselves?

Oh well, another loose end?

[Stormrider]

Andorinha:

Once again, you have dug up the background history for us! Thank you! I agree, the Firebeard and Broadbeam clans must have become familiar with Durin's Day if they had merged with the Longbeards after their homes were wiped away.

It seems to me that Durin's Day may not have been the same date or time of year every time (since one year would have 12 months and another would have 13 months). So they would have had to pay close attention to the stars, moon, and sun to pinpoint that day. I can't believe they would have allowed the calendar sages to dwindle to nothing--but that is what it sounds like from Thorin's comment. Good thing the old Thrush knew when it was!

I think Tolkien just didn't want it to be too obvious for the Dwarves to pin the date down so there would be that element of mystery for the story and to let it unfold when the time was ripe. If he was reading it to his children, they would most likely not even think to question Thorin's statement! But, we, on the other hand, question everything, in time! ;D