Welcome Wednesday!!!!

If your week starts on Sunday as mine does, this is the fourth day of the week, the middle day or mid-week.

The term “Wednesday” is itself a literal word borrowing or calque of the Old English “Wodnesdaeg” and Middle English term “Wednesdei,” which means day of Woden or Woden’s Day.

It gets a bit interesting here.

When the Roman Legions marched North with their raised standards and imperialized much of Europe, those Latin invaders interpreted the German god Woden to be associated with the Roman god Mercury. Perhaps Woden was always Mercury of the North. The ancient Greeks appear to have systemized the naming of the seven weekdays after the seven classical planets in the then understood solar system. One of those planets was Mercury (in the Greek, Hermes), which was either first a planet or a god – it is the first planet from the Sun and it appears to move very quickly, as does the fleet of foot messenger of the gods, Hermes or Mercury.

This is to say that the tradition of associating the 4th day of the week with Mercury appears to be very old, and this convention may have existed or been passed by word of mouth to the regions of Germany and England long before Caesar launched his Legions North. It may even be that the ancient Tribes of the North first associated the planets with the weekdays and the first planet from the Sun with the fourth day, passed this knowledge to the Greeks, who passed the method to the Romans, whose Legions confirmed its origins by arriving on a Wednesday and finding it already named for Mercury or Woden — Legionnaires seldom made mistakes.

However Mercury became Woden in the eyes of my long-ago forefathers, the fourth day of the week became the day of Woden or Wednesday in certain Countries of the West.

As I am sure you have observed to this point, there is much more research that could be done on the origins of Wednesday, but since it is only one day, the work would go into tomorrow, which would raise even more questions and take more time than we have today.

Please take the day for what it is and has always been, the 3rd or 4th day of the week, depending on who you are, what your geographic location is on our planet Earth, where your ancestors came from and how they decided to call the days of the week.

Enjoy your Woden’s Day, whatever it may be named, and have a great 24-hour period,

Grandpa Jim