Personal Blogs

When we were very young we knew, without being told, that Monday was 'washing day', and in fact many people where I lived did do their washing on Monday. But did they have the wrong day?

In Old English the names for the days of the week were

Sunnandæg
Mōnandæg
Tīwesdæg
Wōdnesdæg
Þunresdæg
Frīgedæg
Sæternesdæg

As you see these are Sun, Moon; then four Teutonic gods; then Saturn, and are esentially the same names as today. (But I think the OE versions are more interesting to look at!)

Romans named day after planets (or at least celestial objects) and planets after deities, and other European peoples imitated this high-status idea but sometimes in translation. So we got Tiw, Woden, Thunnor, Friga in place of Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus. Saturn stayed where he was, and then we have the Sun and the Moon.

I've been looking at Old Norse day though, and In Old Norse there was an alternative name for Saturday: laugardag. This has survived into moderin Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish.

It apparently means something like 'pool-day', or 'wash day'. It's probably connected to 'laundry' and 'lavatory' via Latin and French repectively; to 'lye' a kind of soap; and to the name of the Greek resort "Loutraki" (=little bath).

So what was going on? Did Vikings wash more than other medieval Europeans and it's been forgotten? Did they wash their clothes weekly but in the later Middle Ages this was no longer the case? Did Romans wash every Saturn's day but only the north Germanic peoples rembembered there had been such a tradition? Did Old Norse people like to take a cold bath once a week, or visit a woodland spring where minor water deities resided?

Garden ornament theft. It's a gnome problem.