Thunor, the same word as our modern English thunder, was practically, though not philologically, the Anglo-Saxon representative of Zeus.  We are more familiar with his name in its clipped Norse form of Thor.  Thursday is Thunor’s day (Thunres daeg:  dies Jovis) and the thunderbolt, really a polished stone axe of the aboriginal neolithic savages, was supposed to be his weapon.  Thundersfield, in Surrey; Thundersley, in Essex; and Thursley, in Surrey, still preserve the memory of his sacred sites.  Thurleigh, in Bedford; Thurlow, in Essex; Thursley, in Cumberland; Thursfield, in Staffordshire; and Thursford, in Norfolk, are more probably due to later Danish influence, and commemorate namesakes of the Norse Thor rather than the English Thunor.

Tiw, the philological equivalent of Zeus, answered rather in character to Ares, and had for his day Tuesday (dies Martis).  Tiw’s mere and Tiw’s thorn occur in charters, and a few places still retain his name.  Frea gives his title to Friday (dies Veneris), and Saetere to Saturday (dies Saturni).  But the Anglo-Saxon worship really paid more attention to certain deified heroes,—­Baeldaeg, Geat, and Sceaf; and to certain personified abstractions,—­Wig (war), Death, and Sige (victory), than to these minor gods.  And, as often happens in Polytheistic religions, there is reason to believe that the popular creed had much less reference to the gods at all than to many inferior spirits of a naturalistic sort.  For the early English farmer, the world around was full of spiritual beings, half divine, half devilish.  Fiends and monsters peopled the fens, and tales of their doings terrified his childhood.  Spirits of flood and fell swamped his boat or misled him at night.  Water nicors haunted the streams; fairies danced on the green rings of the pasture; dwarfs lived in the barrows of Celtic or neolithic chieftains, and wrought strange weapons underground.  The mark, the forest, the hills, were all full for the early Englishman of mysterious and often hostile beings.  At length the Weirds or Fates swept him away.  Beneath the earth itself, Hel, mistress of the cold and joyless world of shades, at last received him; unless, indeed, by dying a warrior’s death, he was admitted to the happy realms of Waelheal.  As a whole, the Anglo-Saxon heathendom was a religion of terrorism.  Evil spirits surrounded men on every side, dwelt in all solitary places, and stalked over the land by night.  Ghosts dwelt in the forest; elves haunted the rude stone circles of elder days.  The woodland, still really tenanted by deer, wolves, and wild boars, was also filled by popular imagination with demons and imps.  Charms, spells, and incantations formed the most real and living part of the national faith; and many of these survived into Christian times as witchcraft.  Some of them, and of the early myths, even continue to be repeated in the folk-lore of the present day.  Such are the legends of the Wild Huntsman and of Wayland Smith.  Indeed, heathendom had a strong hold over the common English mind long after the public adoption of Christianity; and heathen sacrifices continued to be offered in secret as late as the thirteenth century.  Our poetry and our ordinary language is tinged with heathen ideas even in modern times.