The oldest recorded Germanic month names come from two sources: in 725 Bede listed the months of the pagan Anglo-Saxons (Giuli, Solmonath, Eosturmonath, Blotmonath and more), and around 830 Einhard recorded the Frankish names Charlemagne gave the months (wintarmanoth, hornung, winnemanoth …). The Old Icelandic calendar, with Þorri and Góa, adds a third tradition. Many names now sold as "ancient Germanic" – Hartung, Gilbhart, Nebelung, Ernting – were invented in the nineteenth century. Here is what the sources say, what the names mean, and where legend takes over.
Open any calendar and you are reading Latin. January belongs to Janus, the Roman god of doorways. March belongs to Mars. July and August are two Roman rulers who liked to be remembered. Every year, from Oslo to Aachen, we pin a small monument to Rome on the kitchen wall. And yet there were other names once. Names that smell of hay and firewood, of slaughtered cattle, of the first frost and of feasts whose content we can only guess at today.
This is also where the trap lies. Online you will find tidy lists of "Old Germanic months": Hartung, Hornung, Lenzing, Ostermond, Wonnemond, Brachet, Heuert, Ernting, Scheiding, Gilbhart, Nebelung, Julmond. They sound like longhouses and hearth smoke. A good share of them is younger than the railway. So let's sort it out: what do the sources actually say, what do the names mean, and which ones were born in the nineteenth century?
The safest evidence sits inside the word itself. "Month" and "moon" are siblings in every early Germanic language: Gothic mēnōþs and mēna, Old Norse mánaðr and máni, Old English mōnaþ and mōna. The same Indo-European root is found in Latin mensis. A month, at first, was simply what the moon dictated: the span from one new crescent to the next, roughly 29.5 days. If you want to meet the moon as a figure of myth, read our portrait of Máni, the moon of the North.
The Roman historian Tacitus adds a famous observation. In his Germania (chapter 11), written around AD 98, he says of the Germanic peoples, in paraphrase: they do not count the number of days as we do, but of nights; that is how they fix appointments and deadlines, and the night seems to lead the day.
"nec dierum numerum, ut nos, sed noctium computant … nox ducere diem videtur."Tacitus, Germania 11 (original Latin)
English still carries the echo: a fortnight is literally "fourteen nights", and the old sennight was "seven nights". German Weihnachten, Christmas, goes back to Middle High German ze wīhen nahten, "in the holy nights". In Old Norse, too, periods are routinely reckoned in nights. But notice what Tacitus does not give us: a single month name. For those we have to jump forward six centuries.
The earliest detailed source comes from Northumbria. In 725 the monk Bede, known as "the Venerable", wrote a textbook on time-reckoning at the monastery of Jarrow: De temporum ratione, "The Reckoning of Time". His real concern was the date of Easter, a question churchmen fought over bitterly. But in chapter 15, "De mensibus Anglorum" ("On the months of the English"), he pauses to explain how the old English peoples counted their months before they became Christians.
He is remarkably specific. The English, Bede writes, reckoned their months by the course of the moon. Their year began on 25 December, on a night they called Modranecht, "the night of the mothers", and Bede suspects ceremonies were held that night. The year was divided into two great halves, summer and winter. Then comes the list, each name with a brief explanation:
This is a treasure. The voice here is not a nineteenth-century romantic but a scholar whose grandparents may well have been pagans. Still, Bede explains as a Christian writing about a century after the conversion. Some of his glosses are linguistically transparent (Winterfilleth, Thrimilchi, Weodmonath); others rest on his word alone.
One detail deserves a closer look. The internet loves to turn Blotmonath into the "blood month", helped along by the occasional spelling Blodmonath. Bede's own Latin gloss, however, is mensis immolationum, "month of sacrifices", which fits Old English blōt, "sacrifice", the same word as Old Norse blót, the sacrificial feast. Blood was certainly shed at slaughtering time. But the core meaning is the offering.
Bede's account tells us more. Twelve lunar months make only about 354 days; the solar year has a little over 365. Left uncorrected, a pure lunar calendar drifts through the seasons within a few years, and the "month of cakes" would eventually land in midsummer. The English, Bede says, solved this with a leap month. In a thirteen-month year they inserted a further Litha in summer, and such a year was called Thrilithi, "three-Litha".
Specialists call this a lunisolar calendar: months follow the moon, while the year is tied to the sun through intercalated months. The Jewish calendar works on the same basic principle. How often and by which rule the English intercalated, Bede does not say; anything beyond that is modern reconstruction. Our lunar calendar tool shows how moon phases and the solar year slide against each other – the very problem Bede's ancestors had to wrestle with.
Two of Bede's months bear the names of goddesses, Hretha and Eostre, and neither is known from any other source. Hretha remains a complete riddle; her name is sometimes linked to a word for "glory" or "victory", but that is guesswork. Eostre is on slightly firmer ground, because "Easter" is unmistakably related to her name, which belongs to a root meaning "dawn" and "east".
Whether Bede preserved a real goddess or "explained" a month name after the fact with a deity, as learned writers sometimes did, is still debated. In his favour: Bede is usually sober and had no motive to invent pagan gods. Against: there is no second witness. The continental "Ostara" is a separate story again. Jacob Grimm deduced her in 1835 from the Old High German month name ôstarmânôth – from exactly the list we turn to next. We tell the whole tale in Ostara – the goddess born from one sentence.
A century after Bede, on the Continent. Charlemagne died in 814, and around 830 his courtier Einhard wrote a biography, the Vita Karoli Magni. In chapter 29 Einhard lists what Charles did for the law and language of his people. He had the unwritten laws of his subject nations recorded, collected the old songs about the deeds of ancient kings, and began a grammar of his native tongue. And:
"Mensibus etiam iuxta propriam linguam vocabula inposuit …"Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni 29 – "He also gave the months names in his own language" (our translation)
Until then, Einhard says, the Franks had called the months partly by Latin and partly by "barbarian", that is vernacular, names. Charles tidied this up. Einhard gives each month with its Latin and its new Frankish name:
In the same breath Einhard reports that Charles named the twelve winds too, where before barely four had been distinguished; the east wind became ostroniwint. That tells you what is going on. Charles is not preserving pagan lore; he is imposing order. Some names were surely in everyday use (hornung is widely attested later), others look like neat formations on the pattern "X-month". A ruler who converted the Saxons by force and had the Irminsul torn down was not canonising a pagan festival calendar. He was raising the status of the language of his Frankish realm.
Let's take the twelve one by one. Most of them come straight out of the farming year, which is exactly what makes them so likeable.
Wintarmanoth, winter month, needs no comment. Later Old High German glosses also give January as hertimānōd (Middle High German hertemānōt), from "hard" in the sense of cold and frozen. Keep that in mind; it matters later.
Hornung is the only name without "-manoth", and the most puzzling. It already appears in Einhard, is widely attested afterwards in glosses and calendars, and survived in Alemannic dialects, for instance in Alsace, into modern times. An older explanation linked it to a word for "bastard", a child "begotten in a corner" – February as the short-changed, illegitimate month. Pfeifer's etymological dictionary of German (online at DWDS) prefers a newer reading: Hornung as a formation from "horn", referring to gathering the antlers that red and roe deer shed at this time of year. The question is not fully settled, but the bastard theory is treated there as outdated.
Lenzinmanoth belongs to Lenz, the old German word for spring, probably connected with the lengthening days – the same root as English "Lent". Ostarmanoth is the Easter month; whether the feast named the month or the other way round can no longer be decided.
Winnemanoth is the best story. Old High German winni means "pasture". May was the month when cattle were driven back out to graze. It originally had nothing to do with Wonne, "bliss". Because winni died out as early as the ninth century, folk etymology soon linked the name to wunna, "joy" – Old High German already has wunnimānōd. In the sixteenth century the name was revived as "Wonnemonat", the "month of delight", which also gave the poets their "Wonnemond". The honest translation is pasture month. Less romantic, but true – and anyone who has watched cows leap on their first day out in spring will tell you it is a delight of its own.
Brachmanoth does not mean the field lay fallow. In the three-field system the fallow field was ploughed up for the first time in June. That fits the word itself: Old High German brāhha meant "breaking up, first ploughing of a field", and brāhmānōd is attested as early as the ninth century. In southern Germany the short form Brachet survived.
Hewimanoth is the hay month, and aranmanoth the harvest month: Old High German aran means "harvest", not "ear of grain", even though later scholars turned it into an "ear month". Witumanoth, September, is the wood month – witu is the old word that lives on in English "wood". This was when firewood was cut and gathered for winter.
Windumemanoth sounds like wind but is a loanword from Latin vindemia, "grape harvest". So right in the middle of Charles's "own language" sits a Roman word – neat proof that this list is no untouched Germanic bedrock. Herbistmanoth is the autumn month, though herbist originally meant harvest time (compare English "harvest"). And heilagmanoth, the "holy month", refers in the ninth century to Christmas. Whether an older sacredness of midwinter lies behind it, like the one the Northern Yule feast shows, is a tempting idea but not proven.
Here a common mistake needs clearing up. Einhard's names are not names for lunar months. Charles attached them explicitly to the Roman months of the Julian calendar: January gets wintarmanoth, February hornung, and so on. Those months follow the sun, not the moon. The word "month" still remembers the moon; the system itself had long been Roman in the Frankish world.
Equally shaky is the idea that the Roman names only drove out "the German names" in the early modern period. In fact both systems ran side by side for centuries. Medieval charters and chronicles usually dated in Latin or by saints' days ("the Monday after Martinmas"), while vernacular month names lived on in farmers' almanacs and dialects, with enormous regional variation. In 1869 the Germanist Karl Weinhold gathered a wealth of variants in Die deutschen Monatnamen. A single standard "German series" never existed.
Sooner or later anyone interested in the Viking Age ends up in Iceland. There a calendar survives that genuinely ticks differently – and still runs alongside daily life today. We present it in full, with a date converter, in our Old Norse calendar; here are the essentials.
The Old Icelandic year was a week-year: 52 weeks, 364 days, split into winter and summer, each beginning on a fixed weekday. The First Day of Summer still falls on a Thursday in late April. Because 364 days are too few, summer gradually crept back into spring. Ari Þorgilsson reports in his Íslendingabók ("Book of the Icelanders", written about 1122–1133, chapter 4) that a man called Þorsteinn surtr therefore proposed adding a week to the summer every seventh year, and the Althing adopted it. Ari gives no year; scholars usually place the reform around the middle of the tenth century. The extra week is called sumarauki, "summer increase". The rule was refined later.
The months of this calendar have 30 days each, with four extra nights added in summer. In the series used today, the winter months are Gormánuður (roughly mid-October to mid-November, usually read as "slaughter month"), Ýlir (the month leading into Jól), Mörsugur ("fat-sucker"), Þorri, Góa and Einmánuður. The summer months are Harpa, Skerpla, Sólmánuður (sun month), Heyannir (haymaking), Tvímánuður and Haustmánuður (autumn month). The meanings of Harpa and Skerpla are unknown; the idea that forgotten goddesses hide behind them is sometimes proposed but unproven. Medieval texts such as Snorri's Edda partly give different names, among them a "cuckoo month" (gaukmánuðr) and a "sowing time" (sáðtíð) in spring.
Þorri always begins on a Friday between 19 and 25 January, Góa on a Sunday between 18 and 24 February. Both names are still alive. An origin story opens the Orkneyinga saga (c. 1200; in the Flateyjarbók version the chapter is titled "Fundinn Noregr"): a legendary king Þorri held a sacrifice every year at midwinter, the þorrablót; when his daughter Gói vanished, he held a further sacrifice to learn where she had gone – the góiblót. That is saga material, not history – but it shows that Icelanders were already puzzling over these names in the Middle Ages.
Today's Þorrablót, with singed sheep's head and fermented shark, is a modern revival: Icelandic students in Copenhagen held one in 1873, Akureyri has celebrated it since 1874, but the feast only took on its present shape, with its typical Þorri food, in the twentieth century. The first day of Þorri is bóndadagur, "husband's day", and the first day of Góa konudagur, "wife's day" – the flowers and small gifts given on these days are customs of fairly recent date. How heathens celebrate such feasts today is described in Blót and sumbel explained.
Now for the list that turns up most often on calendars, market stalls and forums: Hartung, Hornung, Lenzing, Ostermond, Wonnemond, Brachet, Heuert, Ernting, Scheiding, Gilbhart, Nebelung, Julmond. It looks complete, sonorous, ancient. In reality it is a patchwork from very different centuries.
Old and well attested are Hornung, Ostermond (as Middle High German Ostermonat), and Brachet and Heuet as southern German forms. Wonnemonat, as we saw, is an old name reinterpreted early and revived in the sixteenth century. The rest has a surprisingly short history. The historian Stefan Grathoff has summarised it neatly, and the attributions below follow his account:
These names arose in the milieu of the German-nationalist language-purism of the time: in 1886 Pfister-Schwaighusen had co-founded the Darmstadt branch of the General German Language Association, which wanted to replace foreign words with "truly German" coinages. They are not tradition but new creations designed to sound old. Hartung at least leans on the attested hertimānōd and the "Hartmond". Gilbhart ("yellowing"), Nebelung ("fog month") and Scheiding ("parting", the month dividing summer from winter) have no predecessor in the sources. Grathoff calls the "fog month" simply a translation of Brumaire from the French Revolutionary calendar.
The pattern of these coinages is telling. The ending "-ung" or "-ing" (Hartung, Ernting, Scheiding, Herbsting) plainly imitates Hornung, the only genuinely old month name of that shape. Lenzing, a regional formation from Lenz that Grathoff lists as Salzburg usage, fitted in nicely. A real exception and a dialect form were turned into a whole series. These sets were passed on through various movements and spread via calendars into today's esoteric and medieval-fair circles – carrying an "ancient Germanic" label they never earned.
You will meet one more, younger layer when you look up pagan festivals today. In the modern "Wheel of the Year" celebrated by contemporary pagan groups, the summer solstice is often called "Litha" and the spring equinox "Ostara". Both names are borrowed: Litha from Bede's summer month, Ostara from Grimm's reconstruction. In Bede, though, Litha is not a festival but a month name – one that covers two months. That is no criticism of anyone's celebration; whoever celebrates this way is creating a modern tradition of their own. It simply helps to know where the names come from. What the medieval sources really say about Yule, blót and the Winter Nights is gathered in our overview of Germanic festivals.
With the Germanic weekday names, by the way, the situation is reversed: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday really do carry old divine names. With the months, Rome won in the end.
Set the inventions aside and something very real remains: the year of a farm. Pasture in May, breaking the fallow in June, hay in July, harvest in August, firewood in September, grape harvest in October, slaughter and sacrifice in November. Iceland adds haymaking and the fat of the dark months; the English add milking three times a day and the full moon that opens winter. No emperor is honoured here – people are working, eating and celebrating.
What that life looked like on a Viking-Age farmstead is the subject of How the Vikings really lived. And if midwinter fascinates you – the season of Bede's Modranecht and Giuli – read on about ancestor veneration at Yule.
In our workshop in Alsdorf we love these names precisely because they are so down-to-earth. A "hay month" on slate, a "Hornung" on a glass for a February birthday – that is real language history, as long as you know where it comes from. Which is why we would rather tell you that the "month of delight" was really a pasture month than sell you a list from 1893 as the heritage of the ancestors.
What are the old Germanic names of the months? The oldest recorded ones come from Einhard (Charlemagne's Frankish names such as wintarmanoth, hornung and winnemanoth, around 830) and Bede (Anglo-Saxon names such as Giuli, Eosturmonath and Blotmonath, 725). The Icelandic calendar adds months such as Þorri and Góa.
What does Wonnemond mean? Not originally "month of delight" but "pasture month": Old High German winni means pasture. The link to Wonne, "joy", began as early as the ninth century, and the name was revived as "Wonnemonat" in the sixteenth.
Why is February called Hornung? The name is attested since Old High German. The preferred explanation today links it to "horn" and the antlers deer shed at this time; the older reading as "bastard month" is considered outdated.
Are Gilbhart and Nebelung genuine Germanic month names? No. According to the historian Stefan Grathoff, both were coined in 1893 by Hermann von Pfister-Schwaighusen, as were Hartung and Scheiding. Ernting was coined by Adolf Reinecke in the same year.
Did the Anglo-Saxons use a lunar calendar? Yes, according to Bede: lunar months with an extra summer month in some years, called Thrilithi. For other Germanic groups there is no comparable source, and the Icelandic calendar counts weeks instead.
What are Þorri and Góa? They are the fourth and fifth winter months of the Icelandic calendar, starting in late January and late February. Their etymology is uncertain; the Orkneyinga saga explains them through a legendary king Þorri and his daughter Gói.
For courage. For remembrance. For legends that live on.
How do heathens celebrate today? · The Germanic feasts · Þorrablót – the winter feast · The solstice festivals · Runes & their meaning.
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