Who or what is Tuesday named after

A. Tuesday is named after one of the oldest gods in the pantheon of the Germanic peoples, Tiw or Tiu in Anglo-Saxon and Ter in Old Norse, the language of Viking-era Scandinavia. He seems to have been the god of war, treaties, justice and guardian of oaths. The Romans identified him with Mars, their god of war, so it came about the Roman dies Martis, Mars' day (which survives as Mardi in French and in similar forms in other Romance languages), became tiwesdeg in Anglo-Saxon.

Q. What is the origin of the seven-day week
A. The Book of Genesis in the Old Testament tells of God creating the world in six days and resting on the seventh, and it is from this that the Jews developed a seven-day week. It seems, however, that this was borrowed from the earlier civilisations of Mesopotamia, the Sumerians and the Babylonians, both of whom also divided time into seven-day periods, one day of which was designated as a day of rest. There is no astronomical basis for having a seven-day unit of time, it is an arbitrary number.

The seven-day week, with Sunday as the first day and the day of worship, became standard in Rome under the Christian emperor Constantine in 321. From Rome the system spread throughout the Empire and its sphere of influence.

Q. How did the other days of the week get their English names
A. The Babylonians named five of the days of the week after planets and the other two after the sun and the moon. The Romans adopted the same system using the sun (dies solis) and the moon (dies lunae), while the other five days were named after gods: Mars (see above), Mercury (Mercredi in modern French), Jupiter (Jeudi), Venus (Vendredi), Saturn (Samedi). Thus in English we have Sunday, Monday and Saturday directly from the Roman system, while the rest of the days have been 'germanicised' like Tiw's day. So, Tiw's father Odin or Woden, who was, like the Roman Jupiter, the top god, gave us wodnesdeg; Thor, the god of thunder, thursdeg; and Frigg - or Friia, Frij or Frea - Odin's wife, frigedeg.

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By Simon Smith