A cut tree showing rings. Their tally tells the tree's age, and their thickness tells whether the years were good or lean.
Treeringlore is a field of lore that seeks to give the eld of a beam of wood by meting its rings.
All trees grow in spring and summer, and come to a halt in the harvest and winter. These two time spells are cast in the rings of a tree: a thick ring for a time of growth, and a thin ring for a time of rest. But the weather frothers from year to year, being wetter or dryer, brighter or darker and hotter or cooler, wielding the growth of a tree and the thickness of its rings.
Many trees in mild lands grow one ring each year. Throughout a whole tree's life, a year-by-year ring-mark is bled that shows the weather in which the tree grew. Enough dampness and long growing months lead to a wide ring, whereas a drought year may lead in a narrow one. Trees from the same spot will likely grow the same kind of ring widths for a given time. These rings can be likened and matched ring for ring with trees growing in the same spot and under the same weather. Following these tree-rings from living trees back through time, tree-tales can be built. Thus wood from old buildings can be matched to known tree-tales and the youth of the wood found out.
To make up for uneven ring scores between trees, lorers take the overall evenscore of ring widths of many trees to build up a ring tale. A tree-ring tale whose beginning and end tides are not known is called a floating tree-tale. It can be neared-off by matching one of its ends with an overlapping stretch from another tree-tale whose tide is known. A tree-tale which stretched back more than 10,000 years was found for rindle oak trees from South Teutonland (from the Main and Rhine), while another was found going back 8500 years for the bristlecone pine in the southwest US (White Highbergs of California).
Today, treeringlorers can guess the right time of former-living lifemotes to the year, to then withmete to radiocarbon taling. If both outcomes are the same, then both are sound.The bristlecone pine, being long-lived and slow growing, has been brooked for this work, with living and dead lifemotes giving tree ring kinds going back thousands of years.
Treeringlorers take on many bugbears, however - for bysen, some kinds of ants living in trees make their mark onto the wood, thus shending the ring.
While eldlorers can brook the craft to deem the eld of any bit of wood and when it was felled, it may be hard to rightly find the eld of a building that the wood is in. The wood could have been taken from an older building, may have been felled and left for many years before brooking, or could have taken over rotten wood.