A groundhog comes out his burrow in Pennsylvania on February 2 and, if he sees his shadow because the sky is icy-clear, determines that winter will linger for six weeks? Nonsense!
It takes more than a little rodent to rule our weather: it takes the thunder god Thor. If he sets up a mighty anvil cloud and smites it with his hammer, summer starts, for only in summer is there thunder.
Thor is his Norse name, in Old English he was Thunor, he corresponds to the Romans’ thunder-god Jupiter, and his day is Thursday (Italian giovedi, French jeudi, Spanish jueves).
And, this year, February 2 is a Thursday.
Every year, it is Torbjorn’s birthday. Happy birthday, Tor!
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This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.
etymology appreciated, the saddest part is the Groundhog doesn’t get a hat.
Guy, I assume you have never heard of thunder snow which happens during winter.
I hadn’t; apparently it’s rare and happens mainly over the Great Lakes.
But my statement was consciously over-simplified. I was remembering that the Navajo call winter “After the thunder sleeps”.
Hah! Six more weeks of winter–wouldn’t know it down here in the US South (knock on wood!). Just joking, Thor! ; )
…….but does the groundhog agree with you on how great this is?
“For only in summer is there thunder” – good poetry.
I assume the Spaniards derived Jueves from Jove. My dictionary says that Jove is an alternate name for the Roman God Jupiter.
Jupiter is equivalent to the Greek God Zeus, which sounds a bit like Jove, so maybe that is why Jove is an alternate name for Jupiter.
Still not sure how the Norse coined the name Thor. Sounds nothing like Jupiter, Jove, or Zeus. My assumption is that Thor comes from thunder, the end result of Jove’s influence on the weather.
The god of lightning and thunder was known in the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family (daughter languages such as English, Norse, German) by forms such as Thunor or Thor, the word for thunder; but in the Greek and Italic (including Latin) branches by forms with a root something like dyi- or dzi-; this appears in Greek as Zeus (nominative case), Dios (genitive), combinative in such name as Diodotus (“given by Zeus”), and in Latin as Juppiter (nomiative, “Jove-father”), Jovis (genitive, “of Jove”). The Greek consonant we transliterate as z may have been anciently pronounced more like dz.
But, in their pantheons (families of main gods), the Greeks and Romans made the thunder-god Zeus or Jupiter supreme, whereas the Germanic peoples made not Thor but a different god, Wotan or Odin, supreme.
The Greek and Latin words theos and deus, “god”, look as if they might be cognate with the di- root, but I believe that they were not.
Groundhog Day may be nonsense in your opinion but it is a great tradition no matter what! It appeals to everyone’s desire for SPRING by this time of winter.
Absolutely. You know I don’t really think it’s nonsense; just a joke for making a connection to something different to say about Groundhog Day or Candlemas, which I’m condemned to blog about every year.
And the feast of Candlemas too.