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Primstav

A primstav (or prime staff) is a device for keeping track of important days and events throghout the year. In other words some sort of calendar. The primstav was usually made of a wooden board or staff where each day of the year was marked with a notch or a small line. The staff had two sides, one for winter (Oct. 14 to Apr. 13) and one for summer (Apr. 14 to Oct. 13.) Special days was marked with a symbol signifying what event or celebration was to take place on that day.

The primstav was in use mainly in Norway and Denmark from the 15th to 19th century, and most of the marks are related to the catholic celebration of various saints. The use of the primstav faded as printed calendars and almanacs replaced them, and after the reformation, the original catholic relevance of the symbols was replaced with more mundane events in the life of a farm throughout the year.

This crate is an attempt to capture some of this information in a library. It's far from complete yet. A command line program is also provided to access the information from a terminal.

One of the difficulties of encoding this information in software is that there exists no single authoritive primstav. The ones that has been found are all slightly different, and local variations may have been quite big. The marks for spring or winter naturally appears at quite different times in the very north of the coutry compared to the very south.

For now I've tried to include most of the information into one dataset, but a better approach may be to recreate the different specimens that has been found and dated. Input and ideas on the issue is greatly appreciated!

Sources

I've relied on the following sources in creating this software:

Store norske leksikon : https://snl.no/primstav

wikipedia : https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primstav

Old homepage of Agnar Nilsen : https://web.archive.org/web/20141121003647/http://home.online.no/~agn-nil/sub/primstav_vaer/primstav.html

Contributing

If you have ideas or want to contribute, please feel free to get in touch, either by email or through the social web (I'm reachable as @harald@hub.volse.no from the Diaspora, ActivityPub and Zot protocols). Corrections, ideas and additional resources are most welcome as well as patches, bug reports and feature requests of course.

License

primstav - look up marked days on the norwegian primstav. Copyright (C) 2018 Harald Eilertsen

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.