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Mythology/9611.nrsrthn.cea

To: alt.pagan,soc.religion.paganism
From: cea20@cus.cam.ac.uk (Carl Edlund Anderson)
Subject: Re: Saturday, Loki, Tueton's and Jupiter Columns
Date: 14 Nov 1996 11:16:19 -0600

In article ,
Darrell Manrique  wrote:
> On 10 Nov 1996, Carl Edlund Anderson wrote:
> 
> >    The difficulties of sorting out which goddess may or not be the same as
> > or very similar to which other goddess is complex.  However, Friday was
> > certainly considered Frigg's day, considering that the original Old Norse
> > was _frjádagr_, from an earlier _fríggjardagr_.
> > 
> >    No day names directly associated with Freyr or Freyja.
> 
> Not so -- the Oxford English Dictionary gives _freyjudagr_ as an alternate
> Old Norse name for Friday, and points out that this is actually a more
> exact translation of _dies Veneris_ ("day of Venus" in Latin).  

   You're right--I stand corrected!

   However, the only example of its use which I've been able to find is in
the _Breta sögur_ (_Breta so"gur_) which is a translation of Geoffrey of
Monmouth's _Historia Regum Britaniae_.  In other words, rather
post-heathen.

   I agree that _freyjudagr_ would be a better translation of _dies
Veneris_, and I suspect that this is what happened here--the Icelandic
translator made a learned creation of _freyjudagr_, since by that time the
standard Icelandic word for Friday would have been _föstudagr_
(_fo"studagr_), and frjádagr/fríggjardagr was being forgotten.

   BTW, it's worth noticing that _fríggjardagr_ was almost certainly *not*
a direct Norse translation of the Latin.  It was probably borrowed from
German (cf. OHG _fríatag_, MLG _vrídach_) or Old English (fr


 
> I would imagine Frigg would be a closer equivalent of Juno/Hera.  Juno was
> rarely used in the middle ages as a name for the planet Jupiter.
> But Jupiter's day is Thursday.  Wouldn't it be delightfully confusing if
> we had "Frigg's day" for Thursday and "Freyja's day" for Friday? :)
> 
> Anyway, I wanted to point out that the practice of translating the weekday
> names (& the planets' names at the same time) goes back through at least
> two previous translations, Greek to Latin and Egyptian to Greek.  I was
> wondering if anyone knows the Egyptian names?  I know that Thoth was used
> for Mercury (the planet), so that would be Wednesday, and Moloch was (?)
> used for Mars; I think Isis/Aset was Venus.  I would be very interested in
> learning the rest, & also learning more about the Egyptian deities bearing
> these names, if anyone has anything to share?
> 
> Darrell
> So many millions of people are getting on the Web these days . . . it's
> just unbelievable . . . I mean, imagine the size of the Spider. . . .

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