So Summer begins. But when? – June 2024 (2024)

Hello everyone. Here we are in what we in Northern Europe consider the Summer month, the details of which can appear very confusing for those uninitiated in the mysteries of meteorology, astronomy and folklore.

First you have the Meteorologists stating that Summer starts on June 1^st. They tend to deal in numbers and statistics and like to split the year, in many countries at least, into four quarters that are based on the annual temperature cycle. This means that they have precise, constant periods of time that enable them to compare and forecast seasonal fluctuations from year to year.

The Astronomers, on the other hand, base all things seasonal on the tilt of the Earth and the way that the amount of light hitting the planet determines the length of the days. So, they judge the start of Summer to be the longest day, or Summer Solstice, on the 21^st or 22^ndJune. At this point, school children will be leaping up to proclaim that the Earth takes 365.2422 days to travel around the sun and that the days are going to be very slightly out of sync each year. They may go on to state that Julius Caesar had a pretty good stab (if I may use the phrase) at correcting the discrepancies caused by his predecessors messing around with the calendar.

The problems faced by Caesar began several centuries previously, when the rudimentary Roman calendar was ten months long and based on the phases of the moon (hence our word month) and the agricultural cycles.

This might have been perfectly adequate for the average sons and daughters of the soil as they scraped a living from the land but the ‘lost days’ soon added up and the worthies at the time were having a problem keeping track of things.

Even when Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome, improved the situation by introducing January and February to cover the wintertime, it only brought the year up to 355 days.

To counter the effects of the shortfall over the centuries, the emperors and priests began to insert extra days, weeks or even an ‘intercalary’ month named Mercedonius into the year. If anything, this led to even more uncertainty as those in power tended to introduce these extra days on an ad hoc basis depending on anything from wanting an extra feast day, to the colour of a sacrificial goat’s innards and very likely if they got out of the wrong side of their latiboia in the morning!

The famed historian, Gaius Seutonius Tranquillus, summarised the situation in his great work De vita Caesarum and how Julius Caesar tackled the problem after 600 years or so of chaos.

Then turning his attention to the reorganisation of the state, he reformed the calendar, which the negligence of the pontiffs had long since so disordered, through their privilege of adding months or days at pleasure, that the harvest festivals did not come in summer nor those of the vintage in the autumn; and he adjusted the year to the sun’s course by making it consist of three hundred and sixty-five days, abolishing the intercalary month,and adding one day every fourth year. Furthermore, that the correct reckoning of seasons might begin with the next Kalends of January, he inserted two other months between those of November and December; hence the year in which these arrangements were made was one of fifteen months, including the intercalary month, which belonged to that year according to the former custom.

The fifteen-month year in question was 46BC and it is the longest calendar year in history, lasting a record 445 days. The following year, the scholars among the Sandal’d and Toga’d Ones deemed the calendar to be realigned with the seasons and the practice of inserting intercalary months into the year was dropped as it was not deemed necessary any more.

When Pope Gregory XIII tweaked the calendar of his classical predecessor in 1582 we were provided with a system of marking the dates that we, and much of the rest of the world, are familiar with today. That is not to say it is perfect. Sometime in the 56^th century all those fractions of a day will catch up and the people will wonder why they are a whole day out. Be that as it may, we can be certain we know when to celebrate the summer solstice and the start of the astronomical summer.

But hold on, I hear you cry, if the start of summer is either on the 1^st or 21^st June, why are we dreaming about Puck, Titania and Donkey-headed Bottom on the 24^th of this month? Is the summer actually going to be that short?

Well, a clue to this puzzle may be found in a completely different calendar to that put forward by the Roman Emperors and their descendants, the Norse Calendar also known as The Wheel of the Year. The Wheel is divided into just two seasons, Winter, lasting from mid-October to mid-April, and Summer, lasting from mid-April to mid-October. This of course places June right in the middle of the Norse summer period.

As we know the Vikings were a well-travelled people and many of their traditions and festivals were incorporated into several countries including Britain, where the Solstice has been celebrated for millennia. It might be that many of the Midsummer traditions that are still very popular in Sweden today have become synonymous with our own solstice celebrations, especially in the North of the country where many of the place names are indicative of their Viking heritage.

So, start of summer, middle of summer, however we celebrate this time of year let us hope for some cheery and carefree summer days.