Another post following a conversation in which I tried to be smug and clever and failed. Everyone knows where the days of the week get their names, right? I thought I did, but became hopelessly lost on definitions for Tuesday and Friday. So, it was a little like naming the seven dwarves: Grumpy, Sneezy, Doc, and the other four. In order to save you, dear reader, the ignominy of starting out clever and ending up looking – as the colloquial term would have it – a right dick, I present for you now the origins of names for days of the week.
So, for an easy kick-off: Sunday. Can you guess? Of course, it comes from our old chums the Romans,. Originally the name of a pagan festival, dies solis, or ‘Sun’s day’ became attributed to what some argue is the first day of the week (but who are wrong). OK, it was originally in the good old days, but these days, Sundays are for overeating and/or recovering from Saturday’s hangover.
Onto Monday: Another gift for the would-be clever-clogs. A good old-fashioned bit of Anglo-Saxon here, with a contraction of their Mōnandæg (pronounced monn-en-day), or ‘Day of the Moon’, and quite possibly nicked from the Romans, who called it dies luna.
Tuesday: Now this is one of the little buggers that had me on the ropes. Of course, I now know, and had I not confessed in the opening remarks above, could pretend to be really clever by regaling you with its roots. Honesty is the best policy – I had to look it up, which could well be how you ended up here. The day is named after the Norse god Týr (also known as ty, tyr, tiwaz and in Old English, Tīw). Tīw was the god of (among other things) heroic victory, and was also once more highly placed than Odin or Thor. He must have missed a meeting or two, because his popularity dropped off, which may account for why I’d never heard of him. Anyhow, his day – Tīw’s Day – is how we still refer to it in modern times, more or less.
Wednesday: I positively radiated smugness for knowing this one. I must have been paying attention at school that day. Except I wasn’t quite right. Wednesday is named after an Anglo-Saxon god called Woden (or sometimes Wuotan or Wodan), and not Odin as I thought. There is the possibility that they are one and the same, but the jury’s out. Woden was pretty much the big kahuna of his religion, and a more-or-less exact match for the Roman god, Mercury, who also lends his name to Wednesday in the Romance languages – miércoles (Spanish), mercoledì (Italian) and mercredi (French). In researching this day, I discovered a new word (new to me, that is). Mercury and Woden were both psychopomps, that is to say, a deity or being whose job it is to escort the souls of the newly deceased to the afterlife. You learn something new every day, eh? So, anyway Wednesday is Woden’s day with a slightly off spelling.
Thursday: Old English again, referring to – of course – Thor. The famous Norse god of thunder and rain and also, strangely, farming. Originally known as Þūnresdæg (pronounced, roughly, Thorn-res-day). In case you’re wondering, the funny D-shaped thingy at the beginning of the word is thorn, a character used in Norse and Middle English alphabets and which still exists in the Icelandic alphabet. I’ll be doing a piece on this and other out-of-favour letters shortly, so stay tuned. Thor’s day. Easy.
Friday: The other one that I simply had no idea about. And an odd one, too. The Fri- prefix is a corrupted or possibly contracted form of the name of one, or possibly two goddesses from Norse mythology, Frige (pron. Fray-a). The reason I say “possibly two” is that there seems to have been two goddesses with similar names, both powerful in their own ways, and a least one of whom having been married to none other than Odin himself. Much of the lore of one has been transposed to the other over time, and we end up with something of a hybrid. She is known by many names, including: Frijjō, Frigg, Freyja, Frike, Freke, Frig and Susan. I may have made that last bit up. Long story short, Norse god.
Saturday: The ‘day of Saturn’ (dies saturni) comes, as you might expect, from the Romans again. Saturn was the god of fertility, agriculture, justice and time, so he had a quite a bit of work on. The Greeks knew him as Kronos, but I feel that Saturday sounds better than Kronoday.
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Most interesting, sirrah. I can honestly claim to have known the origins of Sunday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday, but Monday, Tuesday and Friday, nada.
See, as I told you yesterday, I learn something new every day…
Except how to not overuse ellipses, it appears… =)
What’s wrong with Kronoday?
Psychopomp is a fantastic word, I like it! Thanks, Tom, I enjoyed reading all this very much, too bad a week only lasts seven whaturdays. I look forward to the “out-of-favour letters”.
Doesn’t quite trip off the tongue, does it? Although, now I think about it, if I’d grown up saying it, Saturday might sound weird. Hmmm.
Thanks Maria. Yes, psychopomp is brilliant, isn’t it? If you’d simply put the word in front of me and said “what does it mean”, I would have come up with something like the noise a 70s prog rock band would have made!
Psychopomp is a word I love, too – it features heavily in one of Stephen King’s lesser works, The Dark Half which, funnily enough, is about a writer’s pseudonym, a man by the name of George Stark, who comes after his creator when the author decides to kill him off. So, be careful how you treat any of your own alternative authors, eh Tom?
Alternative authors? I have no idea what you mean. I think it is a truly excellent word, and one that I will weave into conversation whenever the opportunity arises. I can’t really envisage too many openings, but I do like a challenge.
So Mercury was a sort of celestial usher? Next time you go to the EP ask to be ushed by a psychopomp.
My dad always told me they were called ushers because of their job. When he and his friends went to the cinema, a bloke with a torch used to come over and say “Let’s have a bit of ‘ush round ‘ere”. True story =)
So the Romans named the weekend days an the Norseman named the working days, except Monday. Sounds about right but as far as Psychopomp goes, I thought the more literal; “stuck up, git / nutter” I’m not sure if you can translate ‘psycho’ as ‘git’, might be a bit lenient, although ‘gitotic’ has more of a middle England feel than ‘Psychotic’. I can certainly think of a few people who are persistantly a bit of a git and could therefore be called ‘gitotic’ and locked up for eveyones else’s well being. Starting with Gyles Brandreth, the psychopompus git.
I think you are being a tad hard on the Romans, SW (if I may call you that). They did put some considerable effort into building an empire. That said, they did like a good party.
I was thinking along the same lines with psychopomp. It certainly isn’t a word that was bandied about much (read: at all) where I grew up. It does sound like a track King Crimson may have made on one of their off days in the 70s, but I have to admit that the combination of ‘psycho’ and ‘pomp’ was too much for my brain to process in any other way than ‘turbo nutter’.
Oh, and I completey agree with your stance on Mr Brandreth. There should be a law against him.