Let’s continue our dive into the names for days of the week! As with the pattern from the previous days we’ve looked at, we can guess that Friday, too, was named after the god whose celestial body’s hour was the first hour of the day in the Neo-Babylonion empire (days were broken up into seven hours, so each day began with a new hour), but translated from Greek gods to those of Norse mythology.
So who was the sixth day named for in Babylon? Venus. Also known as Aphrodite. Goddess of love.
Who, then, was the equivalent goddess in the Germanic/Norse system? Well, not everyone could agree. The official lady assigned to the day is Frigga, which is indeed where we get that Fri- beginning to our sixth day. But Frigga was specifically the goddess of married love, which isn’t quite what Aphrodite/Venus stood for. Ahem. Some Scandinavian countries think Freya would be a better match, and so countries like Iceland actually named Friday for her instead, making it Freyjudagr (Freya’s day).
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Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary. 
