Weekdays

The MacCallum Theater is hosting a musical this weekend called Anything Goes, preformed by the students at the local college. My brother is working as their stage manager, so we decided to go on tonight; we'd originally been planning to go yesterday, opening night, but my dad wouldn't have been able to make it. Since Thursday was unexpectedly open, my mom decided that she and I would go see Thor (I'll probably write a review for that later). I realized that morning, as we were making plans, that seeing Thor was extremely appropriate, seeing at is was, after all, the day of the week named after that particular god of thunder

The Norse god that particular comic book hero is based on.

My oldest brother, when I was younger and he still living with us, would always call Wednesday "Woden's Day" and Thursday "Thor's Day," explaining that those days were originally called that. I always thought that sounded silly, but as I got older I got in the habit of saying "Woden's Day" and "Thor's Day" to myself as well.

The names we currently use for our days of the week go back all the way to ancient Greece (just like pretty much everything else we now do). When they got their calendar figured out, they ended up with seven-day weeks (not sure if they did that on purpose or not), an decided to name each day after their Seven Planets.

A highly scientific way to do it.

Ancient Greek planets aren't the same as our current planets - they considered the sun and the moon major planets, and the other five were named after five of their major deities, Ares (god of war), Hermes (messenger god), Zeus (god of thunder), Aphrodite (goddess of love), and Cronus (Titan over the harvest).

Then the Romans, who basically stole the entire Greek culture and slapped a different brand name on it, renamed five of those days after their own counter-part gods, Mars (Ares), Mercury (Hermes), Jove (Zeus), Venus (Aphrodite), and Saturn (Cronus), and kept the days for the Moon and the Sun.

These weekday names are what most modern latin-based languages use today. Spanish, for example, says lunes, martes, miercoles, jueves, viernes, and sabado (Sabbath day, from Hebbrew) and domingo (the Lord's day). French uses lundi, mardi, mercredi, jeudi, vendredi, samedi, and dimanche.

Someone with more historical Europe/Britain background might be able to clarify, but as I understand it, the Germanic people then took over the British isles (thus why English has a strong German influence). The new rulers had to get rid of the Roman god-named days, and replaced them with their own counterparts. 

Mars' Day became Tiu's Day (also written Tiwa, the Germanic god of the war and sky). 

Odin (Woden), chief of the Nordic gods.

Mercury's Day became Woden's Day (Also known as Odin in Nordic, not exactly a coutnerpart to Hermes but they had to fit Odin in somehow, since he's kind of the head). 

Jupiter's Day became Thor's Day (Iconic god of Thunder). 

Venus' Day became Frigga's Day (Nordic goddess of love, often confused with Freya, the Nordic goddess of... different love?) 

And since the Nords ran out of time (or something), they kept Saturn's Day as Saturn's day. Actually, the only other major Norse god is Balder, god of light and joy and whatnot, whose entire story revolves around his death. Either his death deemed him unworthy of a namesake day, or the Germans thought saying Baldendaeg sounded ridiculous.


From there, it's easy to see how the English language would have simplified these days down to the ones we know today. While knowing the etymology of our language certainly isn't critical, it makes learning the days in different languages much easier, and it's always interesting to see how our entire culture is still secretly focused on ancient Greek thought and old gods no one believes in anymore.