Читать книгу Primitive Time-reckoning. A study in the origins and first development of the art of counting time among the primitive and early culture peoples онлайн

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It is a natural conclusion that the reckoning in weeks had its origin in the use of the rune-staff. Since the week-day letters on these are repeated the whole year through, the weeks offered an easy means of reckoning. This conclusion is certainly correct, but still we may venture to ask why the week-day letters were admitted into the national calendar by the North especially, and why the reckoning in weeks should be adopted in popular use only there. The reason can only be that the counting in weeks was already in use before the rune-staff was introduced. This mode of counting, which in Iceland had been developed into a curious form of year, was in Scandinavia adapted to the Julian calendar and remained bound up with this. The leap-week was therefore unnecessary. The old basis is however still preserved in the points of departure, the summer and winter nights. It is the same system as the Icelandic, built up on the week and the year, but differently modified: the idea of any borrowing cannot be entertained. The basis of this calendar, therefore, was once common to all Scandinavia, and the calendar must go back to heathen times.