🚀 go-pugleaf

In-Reply-To: <1ics3aINNc2q@bHARs12c.bnr.co.uk> sizex@bnr.co.uk (Eric Barber)

> any ideas on why Saturday was special.

Not a clue. You can see why it's special in Christian communities,
and I suppose we can guess there *might* have been some similar pagan
religious reasons. But do we even know that the Germanic tribes had a
7-day week before their contact with the Romans? What about the
Celts, for example?
There is another way of looking at this, perhaps. Namely, the Latin
names of these Gods were also the names of planets. Of course, since
we know even less about Germanic astronomy than we do about their
religion, I realise this isn't a terribly helpful suggestion.
Since my last posting I've been tring to think if there's a Germanic
equivalent of Saturnus, and I think the answer is: there *isn't* a
god associated with the underworld - in Norse mythology both the Vanir
and the Aesir dwell above the earth and the underworld is associated
with the dragon Nidhogg. (It's also worth noting, I think, that the
word `hell' is one of the few bits of the pagan religious terminology
to survive Christianisation, which might be related to the special
status of Saturday in some way.) So if the Gmc tribes had no
equivalent god that would explain why they didn't bother to translate
the name.
Does that make any sense?

Peter
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Peter Christian                         
  Dept of European Languages              peter@gold.ac.uk
  Goldsmiths' College, London.            petex@cix.compulink.co.uk
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