🌿 Sunday Reflection — The Old Gods Still Speak

We move through the week so easily that we rarely stop to notice the names we give to our days.

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday…They feel ordinary, worn smooth by use.

And yet, beneath them, something very old still lives.

Our days are named, in part, for the Norse and Saxon gods.  They are echoes of a time when the world was understood not as separate from spirit, but as alive with it.

Tuesday carries Tyr, the god of courage and right action.

Wednesday belongs to Odin, seeker of wisdom, wanderer between worlds.

Thursday resounds with Thor, protector, holder of strength.

And Friday, softer, perhaps, but no less powerful, is Freya’s own day, goddess of love, beauty, and the fertile, living earth.

But their presence doesn’t end with the days of the week.

It runs quietly through the language we speak, the places we live, even the names we carry.

Across Britain and Northern Europe, you can still find them in the landscape: in place names like Thundersley, a woodland clearing dedicated to Thor; Wednesbury, a fortified place dedicated to Woden/Odin; or Tuesley, a clearing or wood dedicated to Tyr under his Old English/Saxon name of Tiu.

In personal names too — Freya itself, in the current top ten for girls names in England and Wales; and names like Alfred (“elf counsel”) or Harold (“army power”), carrying echoes of an older understanding of wisdom, strength, and belonging.

Even our everyday words hold traces of this deeper inheritance.

The word love comes to us from Old English lufu, and earlier Germanic roots.  A word not just of feeling, but of connection, of devotion, of the bonds that hold people together.

Health comes from Old English hælth, linked to hal, meaning whole.  Reminding us that well-being was once understood as a state of completeness, a kind of inner and outer harmony.

And will, from Old English willan, speaks of desire, intention, and quiet personal power — that inner movement which shapes not only our own lives, but how we meet one another.

These are not just linguistic curiosities.

They hint at a way of understanding life in which love, strength, wisdom, and wholeness were not abstract ideas, but living forces, expressed most clearly in how we relate.

In how we speak to one another. With care or lack of connection. In how we listen, or fail to give others that very special gift.In how we choose, day by day, to hold or to withdraw, to open or to protect.

So perhaps we might pause, just for a moment, and ask:

Where is Tyr in my life right now? Where am I being asked for courage, perhaps in speaking honestly, or in setting a needed boundary?

Where is Odin? What am I learning about myself through others, or through the quiet mirrors that relationships so often provide?

Where is Thor? What needs protecting, strengthening, or held steady, not only in my own life, but in the spaces I share with others?

And where is Freya? Where does love live in my life?Not only in romance, but in kindness, in attention, in the simple act of truly seeing another person.

We don’t need to believe in the old gods as our ancestors once did.

But we might still listen for them.

In the names we speak.In the places we pass through.In the subtle, often unseen ways we meet one another each day.

Because perhaps they were never only “out there”.

Perhaps they have always been ways of naming what moves within us —and between us —in the unfolding story of our lives.

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