Jamie and Claire's Age Difference on "Outlander" Is Super Confusing (2024)

• Outlander season 5 premiered February 16 on Starz. (For the ultimate season 5 fan guide, click here).
• Jamie (Sam Heughan) and Claire Fraser (Caitriona Balfe), the show's main characters, first met and married in season 1.
  
• In both the series and the Diana Gabaldon books it's based on, Claire is older than Jamie—but how much older?

Outlander is full of mysteries. How do the Craigh Na Dun standing stones work as time portals? Why does Frank see Jamie's ghost in the first episode? How come only certain people can pass through the stones—and what's that buzzing sound about, anyway? And then there's the matter of the show's timeline, though "timelines" may be more accurate given how it hopped between the 20th century and the 18th for four seasons. Jamie and Claire Fraser are always at the center of this century-spanning action, a couple with white-hot chemistry who've been married for over twenty years. Which brings us to another head-scratcher: What is Claire and Jamie's age difference, again?

The answer is a wee bit more complicated than it seems, but here's what we know about Jamie and Claire's ages, according to the Starz series, author Diana Gabaldon's own account, and Caitriona Balfe herself.

Jamie Fraser was born on May 1, 1721.

For consistency purposes, we'll be referencing the timeline of events on Diana Gabaldon's website here. Per Gabaldon's dates, James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser entered the world on May 1, 1721.

Now, here's where things start to get tricky when parsing out book versus show. On her site, Gabaldon writes that Claire falls through the stones on May 2nd, 1946, traveling 203 years back in time to May 2nd, 1743—just after the Gaelic festival of Beltane, an actual ancient event traditionally celebrated on April 30/May 1. By Gabaldon's math, Jamie would have just turned 22 years old in the books.

The show tweaks things a bit, though. On Outlander, Claire falls through the stones just after the Gaelic festival of Samhain, celebrated on October 31/November 1, not Beltane. Notably, this action takes place in 1945, not 1946—six months after V-E Day on May 8, 1945, which is the point where Caitriona Balfe's Claire starts telling her story in episode 1, "Sassenach."

Thus, on the show, Jamie is a smidge older at 22 and a half when Claire first meets him. If we're sticking to the birthday established by Gabaldon, that is.

Claire Fraser was born on October 20, 1918.

According to Gabaldon's website timeline, Claire falls through stones on May 2nd, 1946 (again, not 1945, but more on that later). That would make her 27-and-a-half at the time she and Jamie meet in the books, while Jamie's barely 22. This would make Claire five and a half years older than Jamie.

A small detail from the show confirms that it's indeed around the time of Samhain in 1743 Scotland, too, when Claire lands there. As we've established, Gabaldon says Claire arrived in 18th-century Scotland on May 2nd, 1743. But in season 1, episode 2, "Castle Leoch," Claire figures out what year she's traveled back to when she finds a letter on Colum MacKenzie's desk. That letter is dated November 1, 1743.

But this means that on the show, Claire had to have just turned 27 on October 20, 1945, less than two weeks before she meets Jamie. To recap: By Gabaldon's timeline, Jamie and Claire's age difference is 5.5 years, while on the show, that age gap shrinks to 4.5 years. This also clashes with what Balfe's Claire tells Jamie onscreen, that she is 26 going on 27. In short, these numbers are fuzzy at best.

Gabaldon's Outlander book originally began in 1945, and was later changed to 1946.

The author has explained the reason for this herself on her website, stating the events of Cross Stitch (the original name of the series' first book,Outlander) began in 1945 in the original American edition. It was pushed back to 1946 in the British printings after it became apparent that the dates didn't quite match up there—for example, as mentioned above, there's no way Claire and Frank Randall could've made it to Scotland for Beltane by May 1, 1945 because that's a full week before V-E Day signaled the end of WWII.

As Gabaldon herself wrote, when addressing a question about the character Geillis Duncan's birthday:

The discrepancy in dates is a mistake–it’s a copy-editing error caused by differences between the British edition of the books (which begin in 1946) and the American ones (which begin in 1945). The reason being that the American book was already in galleys when we sold Outlander in the UK.

The difference occurred after Reay Tannahill, a Scot who kindly proofread Cross Stitch before it was published in the UK, said that 1946 would have been a more accurate representation of conditions as I described them in Scotland. So I changed the date- -but the Americans wouldn’t let me change it for Outlander, saying that this would involve re-working all the dates, which would mean re-copy-editing the whole thing, and they didn’t want to do that.

Ultimately, the show basically split the difference by moving Claire's first trip through the standing stones to a midpoint in the fall of 1945.

Caitriona Balfe may be just as confused on Jamie and Claire's ages as we are.

Or, she knows something we don't? We asked Balfe how old Jamie and Claire were in season 5 when Starz invited us to visit the set in Scotland.

"This season Jamie will turn 50. And Claire is 57," Balfe told us. Wait. What?

"She's older, she’s an older lady. She's a bit of a cougar," she joked.

Is this true? Does anyone know how old Jamie and Claire actually are? Guess we'll just have to watch season 5 and find out for ourselves.

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