The Galdorcraft Calendar is a tool for re-animizing our world – for imbuing the living cosmos with spirit through our recognition of its many faces, stories, and songs. The symbols that you see in this calendar are living beings.  For those of us with Northern European ancestry, they are our ancestors, woven into the tapestry of the earth, the sea, and the sky.  When we see their face, when we hear their name, when we sing or play their song, we are one with them again. We become reunited with the story of our people.  In this story we learn/remember all that we have seen and done, and the wisdom that has accrued.  We know what must be done moving forward because the foundation has been laid, the story of our people must move forward, and we have an integral role to play. 

This calendar is a working reconstruction of a runic calendar, the likes of which were used as early as the 1300s but likely much earlier by the early English, Norse, and Germanic peoples.  Practically, these calendars were used to track the solar and lunar dates simultaneously.  They were also used to keep track of the solstices, equinoxes, cross quarters, and eclipses.  But our ancient ancestors did not parse out the mundane from the sacred the same way that we do today.  The conception and use of the runic calendar took place in an era where writing was still very much only understood as a magical art.  Those who held knowledge of the runes had access to primal inherent workings of the universe and the natural world.  The runes are a representation of sound and sounds are the building blocks of our world. 

In coming to this work, I am doing my best to tamper a tendency, that I think we all share, to idealize or begrudge a bygone era. My intention is to embrace my ancestors, to love them, and learn as much as I can about all their strengths and challenges, their triumphs and their follies, the peaceful intercultural exchanges as well as the exploitative colonization. I am very aware that northern european cultural heritage is sometimes misappropriated to perpetuate white supremacist ideology. I strongly regect this interpretation and any use of my ancestry that perpetuates hate and bigotry. I recognize that there were times when my ancestors were the authors and receivers of great harms. I believe that it is our responsibility to understand these harms, there impacts, and work to make them right. This is ancestral healing, and the core of our work to rediscover these ancient technologies.