How were the days of the week (in the English language) named?

by [deleted]
itsallfolklore

The following as an excerpt from my draft Introduction to Folklore, which may help with your question:

The Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians did not employ a seven-day week even when they used the solar calendar. The idea of a seven-day week came from ancient Babylon slowing making inroads into the Roman Empire after the first century. Still, Rome did not formally adopt the week until 321 CE.

People throughout the world recognize a period of time ranging from three to ten days that plays the same role as the modern week. These are frequently divisions of the lunar cycle. In agricultural societies, the week is often four to five days and is tied to markets. Central Africa, for example, has a four-day week with the market as the focus.

For the Babylonians, seven was a particularly important number. They recognized seven heavenly bodies that moved independently of the stars: what we now call Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the sun, and the moon. Each of these astronomical objects corresponded to a deity. In addition, much of Babylonian astrology focused on the moon, each phase of which lasts approximately seven days. It was easy, therefore, to associate each day of the week with a deity. The Romans, adopting this practice, began the week with Saturday, naming that day for Saturn, the most remote and slowest of the visible moving planets. Days for the sun and moon followed, and then Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, and Venus had their respective days. Romance languages preserve these pagan designations.

The Germanic world imported the Roman concept of the week before Christianization, so they substituted the names of their own gods for the Roman ones. They only had, however, a four-day week, and so they discarded Saturday through Monday, which returned later with the Christian faith. In addition, the Germanic world did not associate celestial objects with their gods, so the designations for the days of the week had no counterpart in astrology.

Tiw/Týr, the god of war, assumed the position of Mars. Odin, god of wisdom and magic (Woden for the Anglo-Saxons), took the place of Mercury, although in both cases the analogy was weak. Thor, the Germanic sky god of thunder, was a more obvious substitute for Jupiter. Freya, goddess of love and fertility, assumed the place of Venus.

The preoccupation of the Christian calendar with the importance of Sunday as that religion’s Sabbath was influenced by the popularity of a Roman religion known as Mithraism, which held the sun as sacred. For the Germanic world, Thor was generally regarded as supreme, and so Thursday assumed premier importance. The primary position of Thursday, as opposed to Sunday, created an ambiguity for Northern European folk culture until industrialization and the adoption of the idea of a weekend, consecrating Sunday as the Sabbath. In Germanic-based European folklore, the evening before Thursday or Sunday were the best time for magic. In addition, dreams during those nights had greater potential to become reality. A person born on Thursday should not be baptized on Sunday, and the opposite was also true. If this taboo were broken, the child would grow up seeing ghosts. In addition, only those born on one of those two days had the potential to become a sorcerer.