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Days
See Names of the days of the week and days of the week
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days of the weekGermanic tradition
Further reading Germanic calendar
The Germanic peoples adapted the system introduced by the Romans by substituting the Germanic deities for the Roman ones (with the exception of Saturday) in a process known as interpretatio germanica.
The date of the introduction of this system is not known exactly, but it must have happened later than CE 200 but before the introduction of Christianity during the 6th to 7th centuries, i.e., during the final phase or soon after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. This period is later than the Common Germanic stage, but still during the phase of undifferentiated West Germanic. The names of the days of the week in North Germanic languages were not calqued from Latin directly, but taken from the West Germanic names.
- Sunday: Old English
(
), meaning “sun's day”. This is a translation of the Latin phrase
. English, like most of the Germanic languages, preserves the day's association with the sun. Many other European languages, including all of the Romance languages, have changed its name to the equivalent of “the Lord's day” (based on Ecclesiastical Latin
). In both West Germanic and North Germanic mythology, the Sun is personified as Sunna/Sól.
- Tuesday: Old English
(
), meaning “Tiw's day”. Tiw (Norse
) was a one-handed god associated with single combat and pledges in Norse mythology and also attested prominently in wider Germanic paganism. The name of the day is also related to the Latin name
, “Day of Mars” (the Roman god of war).
- Wednesday: Old English
(
) meaning the day of the Germanic god Woden (known as Óðinn among the North Germanic peoples), and a prominent god of the Anglo-Saxons (and other Germanic peoples) in England until about the seventh century. This corresponds to the Latin counterpart
, “Day of Mercury”, as both are deities of magic and knowledge. The German Mittwoch, the Low German
, the miðviku- in Icelandic
and the Finnish
all mean “mid-week”.
- Saturday: named after the Roman god Saturn associated with the Titan Cronus, father of Zeus and many Olympians. Its original Anglo-Saxon rendering was
(
). In Latin, it was
, “Day of Saturn”. The Nordic laugardagur, leygardagur, laurdag, etc. deviate significantly as they have no reference to either the Norse or the Roman pantheon; they derive from Old Nordic
, literally “washing-day”. The German
(mainly used in northern and eastern Germany) and the Low German
mean “Sunday Eve”; the German word
derives from the name for Shabbat.