Was Thor Worshipped On Thursday?
Вставка
- Опубліковано 26 лип 2024
- Many people know that several of the names for weekdays in English come from the names of Germanic pagan gods. But why is that? Were those gods worshipped on those days? And what even is a week anyway? Those are some of the questions I hope to answer in today's video.
Follow me on Instagram: / studium.historiae
Recommendations for further reading:
-Eviatar Zerubavel, The Seven Day Circle: the history and meaning of the week (1985)
-Roger Beck, A Brief History of Ancient Astrology (2007)
-Tamsyn Barton, Ancient Astrology (1994)
-Carole M Cusack, Conversion Among the Germanic Peoples (1998)
Outro music: Laid Back Guitars by Kevin MacLeod, CC BY-SA 4.0
incompetech.com/music/royalty-...
#history #english #pagan #medieval #astrology #daysoftheweek #thor #tyr #odin #frigg #educational #medievalhistory #rome #thursday #ancienthistory
Thank you. I'm going to binge-watch all your stuff tomorrow; also, you gained a new subscriber!
In the languages that I know the days of the week (English, German, Russian (transliterated), Finnish):
Monday - Montag - Ponedelnik - Maanantai
Tuesday - Dienstag - Vtornik - Tiistai
Wednesday - Mittwoch - Sreda - Keskiviiko
Thursday - (forgot) - Chetverk - Torstai
Friday - Freitag - Piatnitsa - Perjantai
Saturday - Samstag - Subbotu - Lauantai
Sunday - Sonntag - Voskresenie - Sunnuntai
It's amazing to see the similarities between the Indo-European languages and the Slavonic days of the week too.
funny you forgot Thor days in German when the literal translation would be Thunders day lmao (Donnerstag)
I think the 7-day week is derived from the moon cycle and the 7 planets. As you said, each planet is related to hours in a day, they also extended that to days in a month. Since many early cultures realized that the Sidereal moon's cycle is closer to 28 days, it's easy to divide a 28-day month by 7 planet, to assign a planet to each week day, and give you a clean 4 weeks in a month. This whole planets are aligned to months in a year, weeks in a month, days in a week, and hours in a day thing is also very important in Ancient China, except that they divided the stars along the tropic of cancer into 28 constellations, making it easy to assign a constellation to each day. The sun and the moon is then combined with the traditional Five Agent concept (metal/Venus, wood/Jupiter, water/Mercury, fire/Mars, earth/Saturn) with the sun and the moon to give us 七曜 aka 七政, which basically the 7-day week. Although in Ancient China there's no fixed day off in a week, so the concept of week was only used by ancient astrologists, and wasn't important to the regular people.
Very interesting, learned something new.
Interesting video :) for some reason it made me start thinking about the Latin alphabet itself, and how that came about. I've often wondered why the Greek alphabet "lost" to Latin considering the crazy influence that the Ancient Greeks had.
The assumption that this mixing of traditions occured among Anglo-Saxons seems awfully Anglo-centric?
The migrations and merger of these peoples' out of Saxony and Angeln are pretty late events in the connections between Germanic people and Romans.
While the source situation on the beliefs of pre-christian Franks and Burgundians isn't the best they were linguistically and culturally similar to Angles and Saxons and entered the Roman sphere centuries earlier.
This is a worthwhile point to consider, however, the old Frankish and Burgundian languages are poorly attested (what we have is basically just a handful of uncertain words reconstructed from place names). Part of the reason for this is that their written culture became pretty much exclusively Latin by the time they established themselves in formerly Roman lands. We therefore have no evidence that they used weekdays independent of Latin Christian liturgy, let alone what they would have called them. I find it much more likely that they would have simply adopted the Latin terms as they were gradually adopting much of the rest of the Latin language during this time (keep in mind that a big portion of their kingdoms' populations were already speaking Latin natively).
This isn't certain, of course, and I've tried to make that clear in the video, but the origin in England seems to be the most plausible. That being said, absence of evidence doesn't necessarily mean evidence of absence.
Scandinavian weekdays are identical to the old English ones, apart from Saturday(Latin) being laurdag (wash/laundry/housekeeping day)
I disagree, its clearly named after Thor.