Which god shall I be today, Brain?

In honor of tomorrow (Thursday) I am thinking of dressing up like a Viking, complete with red paste-on beard and plastic battle axe. Then Friday I will adorn myself with various jewels and parade around town stopping at strategic locales for photo-ops. Saturday I will cover myself in sack cloth and ashes and sit outside the city gate in the dark where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

And so it will continue - I encourage you to join me, dear reader, in my honor of the days. We have month or week-long holidays for just about everything, so why not add a week to honor the week! After all, it's not often you happen upon words in English containing "dn" in a single morpheme (Wednesday). It's cause to celebrate!

For those of you who may not know, all of our days of the week are named after gods or significant objects in mythology. You might not catch it quite so well in English as in the Romance languages where the days are linked to Roman gods, but indeed, most of our days of the week are named for Norse gods. Here's how it plays out:

Sunday - the sun's day
Monday - the moon's day (ok, still no Norse gods, just keep going!)
Tuesday - Tyr's day
Wednesday - Woden's day
Thursday - Thor's day
Friday - Frigg's day
Saturday - Saturn's day

So the first two days are fairly obvious, but who on earth is Tyr? He happens to be a god of fighting and heroes in Scandinavian folklore. This coincides nicely with French and Spanish mardi and martes, both refering to Mars, the Roman god of war. Wodin (or Odin) was the chief god of the Norse, a mysterious one-eyed magician who was consumed by a yearning for wisdom. The corresponding days in Romance languages actually point to Mercury as their basis, the one significant difference between English and the Latin offspring.

Then of course comes Thor, the rash, hammer-wielding man's man. He is likened with Jupiter (jueves, jeudi) in the Roman pantheon likely because of the association with thunder. We know Jupiter to be a bearer of lightning bolts due to the impeccably researched, faultless to a "T," live footage movie of Hercules, by Disney. They released the movie with Roman nomenclature in Italy, of course, which I happened to see with a number of history professors as a wandering 8 year old - I just took the grand tour a little early, that's all. The point being, the professors could find no fault in the movie, even noting that the original English dubbing was actually historically accurate; they cited the recently discovered Ovid manuscript in which he admits English to be his first language.

I could go on with my rambling, but the information is readily accessible just about anywhere (might I suggest Wikipedia, verily an equal to Disney in every way). I just think we should have more fun with life - live a little - pretend to be Thor for a day....minus the smashing people with a hammer.