Norse Myths · Part 14 · The gods today · A2–B1
The Gods in Our Week
Part 14 of the Norse Myths: the Norse gods never really left. They are in the English days of the week: Tuesday is Tyr’s day, Wednesday is Odin’s, Thursday is Thor’s and Friday is Frigg’s or Freyja’s. Compare them with the Spanish martes, miércoles, jueves, viernes, named after the Roman gods they replaced, and discover the Viking words still in English. Days of the week, prepositions of time (on, in, at), the present simple for routines, and named after, with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Our last Norse lesson, and the easiest. You’ve been speaking the names of the Norse gods all your life, every week, without knowing it. What day is it today?
Thor’s day, Marcos. And tomorrow is Friday, the day of Frigg or Freyja; on Wednesday it was Odin’s day; and Tuesday was Tyr’s. The old gods are hiding in the calendar. Tonight we learn the days, how we use them, and the story behind each name.
The idea of a seven-day week with each day named after a planet, and so after a god, came from the Hellenistic world: astrologers, many of them in Alexandria, linked the seven “planets” they could see, the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn, to the days. The Romans spread this week across their empire, and it is why Spanish has lunes (the Moon), martes (Mars), miércoles (Mercury), jueves (Jupiter) and viernes (Venus).
When the Germanic peoples of northern Europe borrowed the Roman week, they replaced the Roman gods with their own, choosing the god who seemed most similar. So Mars, the war god, became Tiw or Tyr: Tuesday. Mercury, the clever god of travellers, became Woden or Odin: Wednesday. Jupiter, the thunder god, became Thor: Thursday. Venus, the goddess of love, became Frigg (or perhaps Freyja; scholars disagree): Friday. Saturday kept the Roman god Saturn, and Sunday and Monday kept the sun…
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