Germanic
- Where
- the Germanic-speaking regions of northern continental Europe and England
- When
- roughly the first millennium CE
- What survives
- Outsider reports, place names, and post-conversion writing. Very little of it is contemporary insider testimony.
8 entries
Every entry here carries an evidence grade, because the distance between the evidence and the subject is the first thing to know about this material.
- Bede and the Old English Months
One chapter of an eighth-century textbook on time-reckoning, the only surviving account of the pre-Christian English calendar, and what it does not say.
- Midsummer and St John's Eve
The best-documented seasonal fire custom in Europe is medieval and Christian, attached to 23 June, and it drifts against the solstice it is named for.
- Ostara
A spring-equinox festival named in 1974 after a goddess inferred in 1835 from a month name recorded in 725. The three steps come apart cleanly.
- Solstices and Equinoxes
Four instants whose calendar dates move. What they are, why the date shifts between years, and what pre-Christian Europe is recorded as having marked.
- The maypole
An English and Germanic custom with several centuries of records, routinely filed under an Irish festival it has no attested connection to.
- The Old Icelandic Misseri Calendar
A week-based two-season year with a leap week instead of a leap day, described by the people who used it and computable to the day for any year.
- The Wheel of the Year
The eight-festival cycle has three separate provenances, no historical community kept all eight, and it was assembled in Hertfordshire around 1958.
- Yule
A midwinter season rather than a solstice-day festival, and the reason the Christmas and Sol Invictus story is weaker than it is usually told.