[Lalwendë]

Raynor has saved me some time there as I would have put those same quotes on! It does seem that Tolkien did not intend the dates to mean anything deeper, and he was greatly concerned with dates, moon cycles and so on being 'correct' in his work, so this was the most likely reason that he altered dates of events. His point about not wanting all the action to take place in winter is a solid and simple reason - had he allowed this to happen it would simply have restricted his choices for the story! And there is something poetic about moving from winter to spring as they move east and south and we learn more about Middle-earth on the journey. But obviously when he realised the other significance of the dates (in as far as they translate from the Shire calendar to ours) he was probably quite pleased!