Sunday and Monday are obvious in being named in honor of ancient gods of the sun and the moon and we can recognize the god of thunder, Thor in Thursday.

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It was Thor’s dad, Woden who is remembered (though not so clearly) in Wednesday, and Thor’s brother Tui in Tuesday.

Woden was the king of the gods and hung out in Valhalla.  Among other things he was the god of war.

Woden was his Anglo-Saxon name while in Norse he was Oden.

The English modeled our names for the days of the week along the lines of the Romans who had ditched their system of more or less having a name for every day of the month, in favor of the seven day system.  They adopted it from a system that was originally from Mesopotamia where each day was linked to a celestial body.

English kept three—Sunday, Monday and Saturday (from Saturn) but changed the other four to gods they already knew and loved—the only one I’m missing is Friday.

Friday replaced Venus’ day and since Venus is the god of love the Anglo-Saxons put in her place their god of love, who’s name, believe it or not, is Frigg.

It gives a whole new meaning to “thank god it’s Friday”—two new meanings actually.  Frigg was the wife of Woden.

This podictionary episode is a re-run from 2005. I see though that Anatoly Liberman did a piece more recently on Wednesday’s Father and revisited the theme at the beginning of July 2009.