sleen has not yet completed this part of the site. Please bear with a girl as she researches this, and other, topics. Thank Y/you!
Beyond this standardization of hands, months and the length of a year, the names of months used by Goreans have different variations, and can be much more confusing.
The Year, as calculated by different peoples
The typical Gorean year begins with the vernal equinox. However, the Wagon Peoples calculate the year as starting from the Season of Snows, and the Turians start the year at the summer solstice.
A further complication is introduced among the Wagon Peoples, because they essentially keep two different calendars -- the men follow the more traditional calendar of 12 months, 12 passing hands, and the waiting hand, while the women keep a 15 month calendar based on the moon. The 15 month calendar is completely independent of the men's calendar; each month of the 15-month calendar is named after a type of bosk. As this calendar is based on the moon, rather than seasons, the 15 month year does not fit into a traditional year. For example, the Month of the Brown Bosk may in one year fall in the winter, and a few years later fall in the summer.
"Chronology, incidentally, is the despair of scholars on Gor, for each city keeps track of time by virtue of its own Administrator Lists...sometimes cities are willing to add, in their records, beside their own dating, the dating of Ar, which is Gor's greatest city...Time is reckoned "Contasta Ar", or from the "founding of Ar."
---Outlaw of Gor, pp 178-179
A further instance of the confusion this can cause
"He did so late in the spring, on the sixteenth day of the third month, that month which in Ar is called Camerius, in Ko-ro-ba Selnar."
---Assassin of Gor, pp 234-235
The following names for certain months are fairly standardized for those using the Calendar beginning and ending on the Vernal Equinox
This is not truly an entire year, but part of 3 seasons that span 2 of their normal years:
"the Omen Year is actually a season, rather than a year, which occupies a part of two of their regular years, for the Wagon Peoples calculate the year from the Season of Snows to the Season of Snows...the Omen Year, or season, lasts several months, and consists of three phases, called the Passing of Turia, which takes place in the fall; the Wintering, which takes place north of Turia and commonly south of Cartius, the equator of course lying to the north in this hemisphere; and the Return to Turia, in the spring, or as the Wagon Peoples say, in the Season of Little Grass. It is near Turia, in the spring, that the Omen Year is completed..."
---Nomads of Gor, pp 11-12
"During the days of the Waiting Hand the streets are almost deserted, and in the houses there is much fasting, and little conversation, and no song."
---Assassin of Gor, p 211
a girl has not been able to find much description of Gorean seasons. The most she has found deals with the seasons as reckoned by The Wagon People, and only then indirectly in a description of the Omen Year:
Winter = Season of Snows
Spring = Season of Little Grass
Summer = ?
Fall = ?
However, as Gor is a Counter-earth, and Gor's geography resembles Earth, a girl assumes that Gor experiences the same types of seasons as those found on Earth. In temperate climates, winter, spring, summer and fall; in areas close to the equator of Gor, the seasons would blend together to a year-round summer-like state; and in the northern-most and southern-most reaches of the planet, the seasons would blend into a year-round winter-like state.