Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

Tiw, Mars and the Naming of Tuesday

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
Tiw, Mars and the Naming of Tuesday

Tuesday is the first weekday in English whose name departs from the Latin planet entirely. Dies Martis, Mars's day, became Tiw's day among the Germanic peoples through interpretatio germanica, the practice of substituting a native god judged equivalent to the Roman one being named. Tiw, a war and law god known more fully in Old Norse as Tyr, was read as Mars's Germanic counterpart because both presided over combat and, in Tyr's case, the binding oaths that made organised warfare and legal order possible, a somewhat broader portfolio than Mars's alone but close enough for the day name to transfer.

The Romance languages took the opposite path and kept the Latin planet directly: martedi in Italian and mardi in French both preserve Mars by name without any Germanic substitution, since the Romance tongues descend from Latin itself rather than layering a translation over an inherited planetary system the way English and German did. The split between the two naming strategies, Latin retained in the Romance languages and Germanic gods substituted in English and its relatives, runs consistently through Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, making this pair of naming conventions one of the clearest linguistic fossils of the old planetary week's spread across two different language families.

Sources Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and BeliefsJohn Lindow with Deutsche MythologieJacob Grimm

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.