Lunisolar Calendars

Restoring Ancestral Daykeeping

A growing system of reconstructed calendars that align the cycles of the sun and moon across cultures.

Each calendar draws from a different tradition—Anglo-Saxon, Norse, Celtic, and beyond—reconstructing older ways of tracking time and bringing them back into use.

Lunisolar Calendars is an ongoing project exploring how different cultures once aligned time to both the sun and the moon.

The calendars presented here are working reconstructions—built from historical sources and adapted into forms that can still be used today.

Each one reflects a distinct cultural system, with its own symbols, names, and seasonal structure. Beneath these differences is a shared lunisolar pattern that tracks both the solar year and the phases of the moon.

The current collection includes Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic calendars, with additional traditions to come.

Why It Matters

Modern timekeeping is precise, but often disconnected from the natural rhythms it was originally meant to track.

Lunisolar calendars restore a cyclical sense of time—where the year turns through light and darkness, the moon shapes the months, and seasonal thresholds carry meaning.

Rather than treating time as a sequence of numbered days, they present it as a living system that can be observed, followed, and experienced.

How It Works

All of the calendars in this project follow the same underlying principle: they align the solar year with the lunar month through a repeating 19-year cycle.

• Find your date on the Gregorian ring
• Move to the current year in the 19-year cycle
• Read the corresponding lunar month, lunar phase, weekday, and seasonal markers

This allows solar and lunar time to be seen together at a glance, while each calendar expresses that structure through its own cultural symbols and seasonal traditions.

The Lunisolar Cycle

A lunisolar calendar reconciles the difference between 12 lunar months and the solar year.

Twelve lunar months add up to about 354 days, while the solar year is about 365 days. That creates a gap of roughly 11 days each year.

To keep the moon and seasons aligned, an extra month is added every 2 or 3 years. Over a full 19-year cycle, seven leap months are inserted, bringing lunar and solar time back into near alignment.

This 19-year pattern is known as the Metonic cycle.

Current Calendars

The current collection includes three working reconstructions, each rooted in a different cultural tradition.

A Growing Body of Work

These three calendars are only the beginning. Lunisolar Calendars is intended to grow into a wider collection of reconstructed calendar systems drawn from other cultural traditions as well.

Each new calendar will explore a different symbolic language and seasonal structure while remaining rooted in the shared rhythm of sun and moon.

A Calendar Rooted in Tradition

Runic calendars and related systems were used for centuries as practical tools for tracking the year. They combined observation, symbolism, and seasonal knowledge into a compact and usable form.

This project continues that tradition by reconstructing these systems and placing them back into daily use.