Good morning, all!

This is the week I'm doing two open threads. I've moved from Wednesday to Sunday, from the day of Odin to the day of the Sun.

I find the origins of the days of the week downright strange. Apparently, it's a fairly old tradition to to name the days of the week after planets. The Romans associated the planets with some of their deities (which, as Eddie Izzard says, they mostly borrowed from the Greeks).

I was going to include a clip here from Eddie Izzard's fabulous show Dressed to Kill, but it is apparently "blocked in country" by NBC/Universal, which is claiming copyright. So they're preventing me from sharing it. How lovely. I suppose it doesn't matter that I bought a copy. Isn't capitalism grand?

Anyway, the Romans thought the first day of the week was for worshipping the sun, the second the moon, Tuesday for Mars, Wednesday for Mercury, Thursday for Jupiter, Friday for Venus, and Saturday for, obviously, Saturn.

In fact, the Romans actually invented the seven-day week between the 1st and 3rd centuries AD, replacing an older 8-day way of reckoning time. The reasons we know this are pretty cool, so I'm going to quote Wikipedia (which is quoting E. G. Richards' book Mapping Time, the Calendar and History, Oxford 1999, and Peter Keegan's book Written Space in the Latin West, 200 BC to AD 300 ):

Our earliest evidence for [the seven-day week] is a Pompeiian graffito referring to the 6th February (viii idus Februarius) of the year AD 60 as dies solis ("Sunday"). Another early witness is a reference to a lost treatise by Plutarch, written in about AD 100, which addressed the question of Why are the days named after the planets reckoned in a different order from the actual order?.

It's funny, because I was thinking of asking that same question 1,918 years later.

So the Roman empire spread the notion of the week and the association of the days with both planets and gods, but colonials and neighbors, as usual, changed and interpreted the system to suit themselves. We English-speakers got our version from German, probably via the Saxons:

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 AD 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.[13] 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.

This is why we don't talk about dies solis, but rather something much more like Sunnandæg, from the proto-Germanic Sunnōniz dagaz, "day of the sun." Interestingly, the Germanic languages preserved this connection of the first day of the week with the sun even after the introduction of Christianity, unlike a lot of the Romance languages, which changed the name to some variant on "the Lord's day."

The Moon's day stayed the moon's day in Germanic languages, and thus in English, but they did not retain the Latin word for the moon. Romance languages did, which is why you have the Spanish lunes and the French lundi (you can see the connection to the word luna). We have Monday because our word for the moon does not have a Latin origin. In the Old Norse, Mani is the personified (and deified) Moon, the brother of the Sun.

Here's where it gets interesting; for the Romans, the third day of the week was dedicated to Mars, the god of war. But to the northern Europeans who shaped this part of our language, it was Tyr's day. Were they substituting the closest parallel for the Roman deity of war they could think of? Tyr is an interesting choice. Many of the Norse gods were involved in warfare. Tyr is the one who put his hand in the wolf's mouth, so I think of him as a god of sacrifice for the common good, not much like Mars and certainly nothing like the Greek Ares.

Perhaps it's the other way around, and it was the Romans who drew the parallels. Tacitus said of the Germans, "Among the gods Mercury is the one they principally worship. They regard it as a religious duty to sacrifice to him, on fixed days, human as well as other sacrificial victims." Tacitus was talking about Odin, or Woden, whose day is Wednesday, or Wodens' day. Mercury is very clever of course, a god of conversation, intelligence, and invention (also thievery, if you listen to the Greeks!) but Woden is a god of wisdom and magic. To me there's a difference, but then again, the alchemists saw Mercury as something deeper than a brilliant scoundrel.

Thursday is Thor's day, of course. Pretty straightforward, like the god himself. But the leap from the Mediterranean to Northern Europe has never been over a greater gap. The fifth day of the week, to the Romans and Greeks, belonged to Jupiter, or Zeus. I am at a loss to find any correlation between Jupiter and Thor other than the fact that the both wield the thunderbolt. I guess that was enough for the ancients!

I always thought Friday was Freya's day, but it's actually Frigg or Frigga's day, and the only day other than Sunday named for a female deity. The Norse evidently thought that the planet Venus itself was Frigg's star. She is the wife of Odin, and is associated with foreknowledge; her name may mean "beloved." She seems awfully solemn to be the namesake of a day we mostly associate with celebration and festivity because the work week is over.

Saturn is the only Roman deity who kept his own name, derived from the original language, as the name of his day. I don't know why. He is an incredibly complex god, and it's easy to forget those complexities and reduce him to his Greek version, the titan Cronus. The story of swallowing his children is so vivid that it tends to be what most people remember. I know it's what I remembered! However, he is also a progenitor god, associated with founding Roman culture, including multiple Roman towns: the bringer of agriculture, laws, and civilization. At the same time, his festival is the exact opposite of civilized restraint: the Saturnalia, when all are liberated from the ordinary restrictions of society.

He's a complex being. It's perhaps fitting that he kept his day, since he is also a god of time.

Here's what I'm reading this week:

Judith Herrin
Byzantium: the Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire

It's full of information, but I'm finding it rather slow going. Trying to finish it before interlibrary loan wants it back on the 25th. I'm about halfway through. Maybe my brain is not used to reading academic writing anymore! Her method of organization is not strictly chronological, which I appreciate; while there's a place for history that says "This happened...and then this happened...and then this happened," changing that up from time to time challenges the brain.

I've just finished reading about eunuchs, who occupied some fairly prestigious positions in Constantinople (apparently castrating your sons and giving them to the Empire was fairly common--yikes!), and now I'm on to a chapter on imperial children, and the establishment of a hereditary imperium.

I need to make it to at least the Macedonian period, if not to the wretched crusade that basically brought Constantinople down in 1204, before the book is overdue. Another history of Constantinople is on my filing cabinet, untouched. I wish I read as quickly as I used to!

I am now watching Deadwind, a Finnish murder mystery about a woman who is found dead on the site of a proposed sustainable development. A wind energy company has proposed the development, and she is a consultant on the project, and the lover of one of the company owners. She's killed and her body dumped on the development site. So far I don't actually know who did it. Good stuff.

This song has been my earworm for the past few days. I'm not the biggest Madonna fan in the world, but I respect her. This is one of her better ones:

I like her better when she's singing lower in her range. Her voice is richer and stronger there.

How are y'all this morning?