Term for period between vernal and autumnal equinox

Solution 1:

Not that I am whole-heartedly suggesting this as a viable modern sense, but during elder days in the Northwest of our world, the word for the period extending from the vernal equinox to the autumnal one was quite simply Summer — nothing more, and nothing else.

There were only two seasons not four in this system, and we preserve this even today in our own Midsummer and Midwinter. That is why its midpoint at the solstice is called Midsummer’s Day. That is also why the midpoint of Winter is on Midwinter’s Day, which is the opposite solstice.

Alfta Lothurrsdottir discusses this in her Religious Practices of the Pre-Christian & Viking Age North under time-keeping:

The Two Great Seasons

The major unit of time keeping for Heathens was the two great seasons. Unlike our four seasons, they had two which consisted of Winter and Summer. Sometimes they were called Spring and Autumn but it was still only two seasons that were meant. Each one was 26 weeks long. This practice turned into four seasons the farther South one went but for the most part, the Northern Europeans seemed to have kept a two season calendar. [...] Both the Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse have terms that support this two-fold division of the year.

Iceland, Greenland, and indeed also England reckoned the year into having two seasonal halves. That means that old records that measured things in seasons were actually twice as long than many casual readers would reckon things: eight seasons ago is four years, not two.

It is not hard to see why they did this. In Reykjavík during midsummer, the sun never completely deserts them, and during midwinter, it is hardly to be seen.

We can see this in our earliest records of the words in English, where winter and summer — or equally, summer and winter — was how one specified a full year. Citations from the OED:

A. 1000 Phœnix 37 (Gr.) ― Wintres & sumeres wudu bið ʒelice bledum ʒehongen.

C. 1205 Lay. 2861 ― Enne blase of fure, þe neuer ne aþeostrede wintres ne sumeres.

Time was reckoned differently then. They would often count years by counting winters, and so a man of twenty winters was a twenty-year-old, just as a two- or three-year-old was a twinter and a thrinter respectively.

However, even their ideas of summer and winter were not quite ours. For them, the summery half the year began during mid-to-late April, and the wintry half during mid-to-late October. Samhain marked the end of the harvest and the beginning of winter, and Beltain, close to our own May Day, the beginning of summer. The cross-quarter days were useful in the common mindset, because of the thermal inertia that causes the apparent season to lag behind the actual solstices and equinoxes.

It wasn’t too long after the invasion of the southern occupiers from Normandy that the sense of a four-season year began to evolve: