Bilbo's and Frodo's birthday

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

The date of that joint birthday can be found on the first page of Chapter I in The Lord of the Rings. Surely it wouldn't be too arduous to look it up.

[EDIT] I was, of course, completely ignoring Appendix D to The Lord of the Rings. It's probably worth going into some detail on the matter it covers, since its contents make sense of this thread.

Tolkien 'translated' the Westron names of the various Shire months into those of our own calendar but left the dates unchanged. He says of the correspondance

It appears, however, that Mid-year's Day was intended to correspond as nearly as possible to the summer solstice. In that case the Shire dates were actually in advance of ours by some ten days, and our New Year's Day corresponded more or less to the Shire January 9.

Allowing for the differing lengths of Shire months (and assuming that we're not dealing with a leap year) the correspondance ought to be as follows. Any mistakes in calculating these correspondances are mine.

1 Afteryule = 24 December
1 Solmath = 23 January
1 Rethe = 21 February
1 Astron = 23 March
1 Thrimidge = 22 April
1 Forelithe = 22 May
1 Afterlithe = 23 June (allowing for the two Lithes but not an Overlithe)
1 Wedmath = 23 July
1 Halimath = 22 August
1 Winterfilth = 21 September
1 Blotmath = 21 October
1 Foreyule = 20 November

However, in order for this to be in any way accurate one would have to allow both for our own leap years and the Shire Overlithes, each in their proper places. In the above typical year, though, the Birthday would fall on September the twelfth. I wouldn't be celebrating it then, though, because I only celebrate actual events.

[ August 25, 2003: Message edited by: The Squatter of Amon Rûdh ]