David Gaider apparently is not a math genius

[mirisa_ardruna]

So! I just recently bought the second of the two Dragon Age novels, this one being "The Calling," which more or less details the reintroduction of the Grey Wardens into Ferelden. I have finished it, and I can pretty much definitively say that the DA Timeline doesn't make a lick of coherent sense. At the very least, it doesn't add up right--there

Comments

[beccastareyes]

I'm curious why someone would specify both that it was the 9th Age and the Dragon Age, since they convey the same information. I mean some calendar redundancy is nice -- says the woman who reads classic Mayan and has seen Mayan math errors pointed out* -- but do they really need to do this?

(Also a diagram would really help here...)

* The Calendar Round basically can tell you which day you mean on a ~52 year cycle by the date in the civil calendar and the sacred calendar. So today is 8 Kawak 7 Sip, which last occurred in 1959 AD, but can be exactly dated by 12.19.18.6.19 in the Long Count. So, if I know the date is 12.19. something, I can figure out what it is from knowing the calendar round date. And if I know the Long Count date, I can tell you the calendar round date. Which helped a lot when people were trying to puzzle these things out. Especially since Mayan scribes also tend to add '1.13.1 until the end of the bak'tun' as well to their dates...

[mirisa_ardruna]

There's a couple possibilities for that. The most logical to me is that it's sort of a cultural touchstone--a way of remembering what the Age is meant to represent. Also, possibly a way to differentiate when someone is giving the date as opposed to the time of day (there are clocks in Thedas--you see them in certain locations, and it does go on a 24-hour day cycle--this is proven in "The Calling" when Bregan is teaching the Architect what a day is).

Another possibility has to do with the fact that there are two distinct Chantries. The one that this particular dating system goes by comes from the Chantry in Val Royeaux in Orlais. But there is ALSO the Tevinter Chantry, and Tevinter has been around since well before the Divine Age (the first of the modern Ages), so it's likely that they may operate on a somewhat different calendar system.

[beccastareyes]

Ah. So sort of a way of specifying which calendar you use.

[mirisa_ardruna]

Maybe. It doesn't elaborate on the "why" so much. Also, all of the knowledge we get on Tevinter comes secondhand, through codex entries and by conversation topics with certain characters (one of your companions in DA2 is Fenris, who is the escaped slave of a Tevinter mage, and he'll occasionally talk about what things are like in Tevinter as opposed to the Free Marches), so I can't say if the Tevinter people use a different calender or not.

I sort of treat it the way people use "A.D." or "Common Era" or the like. It seems to be a big ceremonial deal, the naming of each Age, so it's probably a bit of a novelty at first, and then people are just in the habit of using it after a while.