Manthar’s Notes: Kharndam Calendars (Part II)
Originally published at The Codex Continual. You can comment here or there.
[Continued-Calendars of Rokhal’s Progenitors]
Blazetime (BT) is the solar-calendar of the giants, started with the rise of First Kalsiddar on the continent of Shael. There is one Sunkeeper for each tribe or clan of giants whose sole job is to record history for that clan or state. Sunkeepers also map the sun’s changes and details and suffer the visions that bring the coming years’ names with them. Thus, giants name their years between five and twenty years in advance, though there is always discussion and debate among Sunkeepers as to whose vision takes precedence for years when there are conflicts in visionreads. While the standard of naming years held during the Aurum Alliance, it is a practice long abandoned by all but the giants as few races were as gifted with oracles as they.
Some giant tribes or nations have a Moonskeeper whose job entails tracking the phases of all three moons. This Moonskeeper is often less mentally stable due to overlapping or conflicting additional visions from each moon or gods tied to each moon. While there were attempts in the past to base calendars off the lunar cycles, they proved too confusing for laymen and priests alike. Thus, of all the giant or allied civilizations over history, only tragic Challomdar ever used a lunar calendar for longer than two Cycles (and many a Sunkeeper will insist such folly was what led to their awful end, though others incline more toward the savagery of the Wyrmultitude).
Blazetime and Elementime are the original bases for every calendar since the Second Age. They mapped out the 400 day year, 100 days in each season. They also established the year starts at Wintersdeep for nearly all races, marking Day One as the bottom of the Dark of the Year and growing more light. Blazetime may yet be used among the few giants remaining on Rokhal, though their lack of contact with outsiders limits current news.
Aureckoning or “Goldyears” (AR) was the calendar adopted by the Aurum Alliance long after the giants inherited rulership from the dragons after the Age of War ended. Aureckoning began in the Third Age when the Aurum Alliance ruled from the Isle of Vros and the majority of the races lived in peace across Dharual. The calendar continued long after the fall of the Alliance until subsumed by the Drakereckoning calendar. Like those above, its 400-day-year remained the standard during its 74 centuries; each year had four names for each year (one from each of the predominant Sunkeepers of the continents of Rokhal, Shael, Orpak, and Lammok ). Had the Alliance not fallen, it would be marking the current year as 9,649 AR.
Goblins, whether the foul, corrupt creatures they are today or the less reptilian version they were for the first Six Ages, have never been great historians. They relied merely on oral traditions and the memory of their skalds for much of their earliest histories. Time after time, they became the underlings of the powerful, whether dragons or other dragonspawn. They marked time by their liegelord’s pleasures and preferences, not caring a whit either way. (Mind you, individual goblins might have cared deeply of history, as did long-dead Son’rul of Islathor; twere but the broader species that cared little about building its own calendars.). Not until they became the de-facto rulers of Rokhal and the other continents in the Sixth Age did any goblins create a racial calendar, and they called it Clawreckoning, after the “True Rule of Claw and Fang and Drake and Scale!” Its years correspond to the Underdrake years of the Drakereckoning calendar, and many a goblin howls that they “came up with what humans stole from us!” The current year among goblins of Dharual, e’en though their rule ended a millenary past, is 2,327 CR.
[Continued]
© 2009 by Steven E. Schend. All rights reserved.