Tiw

Also Known As: Old English Tīw, also Tīg, Tī and the glossary form Tiig; from Proto-Germanic *Tīwaz, ultimately the Indo-European word meaning simply “god”; cognate with Old High German Ziu and Old Norse Týr
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Anglo-Saxon Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: English writers reach for his name wherever a Latin text says Mars, which makes him a god of war and of the sword by translation rather than by story.
Role in Mythos: He holds the third day of the week, one of the runes, and a handful of clearings and pools in southern England, and no surviving English text gives him anything else to do.
Relation to Humans: The people who named Tuesley and Tysoe after him left no account of what they did there, and by the time Norman clerks wrote those names down the cult behind them may already have been a memory. He reaches modern English speakers once a week through the calendar, without their noticing.

Somewhere around the year 700, an English scribe working down a column of hard Latin words came to Mars, Martis and wrote four letters beside it: Tiig. That gloss sits in the Épinal-Erfurt glossary, among the oldest surviving scraps of written English, and it is also the closest anyone in England ever came to putting down who this god was.

The pattern holds everywhere his name appears. Tīw, Tīg, and once a puzzling form that reads as Tuu, turn up in the vocabularies as the English word a translator used when he needed a Roman war god. That is how we meet him. Not through a hymn, not through a myth, not through a priest, but through a working scribe’s shorthand for a foreign deity, written in a room that smelled of vellum and lamp smoke by a man who had probably been baptised as an infant.

The one place he gets a scene is an accident of translation. In the Old English Martyrology the emperor Decius drags Pope Sixtus before an idol to make him sacrifice, and the English writer, needing a name for the god in the temple, calls it the deofolgyld of Tīg, the devil-idol of Tiw. So the fullest English sentence about him has him standing in stone in a Roman prison yard, smoke rising off a dish of coals, while a Christian refuses him. The god being refused is Mars. The name being used is his.

He fared better in the calendar than in the record. Late Germanic speakers calqued dies Martis into a day of *Tīwaz, and in England that became Tīwesdæg, which is Tuesday. The Old English version of the Rule of Benedict glosses tertia feria, the Church’s carefully numbered third weekday, with the name of a heathen god, and nobody involved seems to have thought it worth a comment. Wulfstan counts the same day the same way. A leechbook preserves the phrase on Tīwesniht, Tiw’s night, the eve of his day, in a text about when to do things to a sick body. His name outlasted his worship by centuries as a unit of scheduling.

The runes keep him too, though they cannot agree what to call him. Four manuscripts give four names for the t-rune: Sangallensis 270 and Vindobonensis 795, both ninth century, call it Ti; Cotton Domitian A.ix in the tenth calls it Tir; Byrhtferth’s manuscript in the twelfth calls it Tyr. The Old English Rune Poem gives the letter a stanza. Tir biþ tacna sum, healdeð trywa wel wiþ æþelingas; a biþ on færylde ofer nihta genipu, næfre swiceþ. Tir is one of the signs, it keeps faith well with noble folk, it is ever on its course above the mists of night and it never fails. Anyone who has stood outside in the cold and found the one fixed point in a turning sky knows what that describes.

The poem may not be about him at all. Old English tīr is an ordinary word for glory and fame, a gloss reading “fame, honour” was written beside the rune, and both tacn and færyld carry astronomical senses elsewhere in the language, one for a sign of the zodiac and one for the path of a planet. So the stanza can be read as a god, or as glory, or as the north star, and the three readings sit in the same eight words without resolving.

The ground remembers him better than the books do. Tuesley in Surrey appears in Domesday as Tiwesle, Tiw’s clearing. Tysoe in Warwickshire appears as Tiheshoche, from Tīges hōh, the spur of land belonging to Tiw. Tuesnoad in Kent is his piece of woodland, Tyesmere in Worcestershire, recorded in 849, is his pool, and Tislea in Hampshire has been read the same way. The shape of that list is the interesting part. These are clearings and standing water and the shoulder of a hill, wet leaf litter and open sky, not buildings. Whatever the English did in his name they did outdoors, in places you reach by walking. Margaret Gelling, who did the work that made these names legible, noted that they are markedly fewer than Woden’s or Thunor’s, and that by the time some of the later ones were coined his cult may already have been old. Tewin in Hertfordshire, recorded as Tiwingum in the 940s, has been read as the people of Tiw, and has also been read, more plausibly, as the followers of a chief called Tiwa.

Tysoe carries the one monument anyone has tried to attach to him. Cut into the red clay below the Edgehill escarpment there was once a horse figure, first recorded in 1607, nearly a hundred yards long, which gave the whole valley the name Vale of Red Horse. Farmers ploughed it under and it is gone. Since the 1930s it has been linked to the war god whose name the parish carries, and the suggested dates for the cutting run from the Anglo-Saxon period to the fifteenth century. That link is a modern proposal about a lost earthwork, not a medieval statement, and it should be held loosely.

The archaeology is thinner still, and one of its best pieces was withdrawn. Three fifth-century cremation urns from Spong Hill in Norfolk carry impressions of the same rectangular die holding three runes, and the first reading of that stamp took it for the god’s name. Pieper’s reinterpretation, now generally accepted, reads it instead as alu in mirrored runes, a word for ale or protection or magic. The arrow-shaped and tripod-shaped stamps found on other cremation urns have been identified as t-runes and read as commending the dead to Tiw’s care, which is an interpretation of a shape rather than a text anyone can construe. Two centuries before the English arrived, Germanic soldiers from Twenthe serving with a Frisian unit raised an altar on Hadrian’s Wall to Mars Thincsus, which shows the god had reached British soil early, though not in English hands.

His origin is the oldest thing about him and the reason his file is so bare. The name is not really a name. It descends from the Indo-European word for a god, the same word behind Latin deus, so at some point he was simply the god, and the evidence from England catches him long after something else had taken that position. The royal houses of the English traced their descent from Woden, not from him. Bede gives Hengist and Horsa a pedigree running back to Woden and says nothing about Tiw anywhere.

What he can do, on the English evidence, is win and bind. The Mars equation gives him victory in battle, the Housesteads epithet ties the same god to the þing where judgment was handed down, and the rune poem’s tir keeps faith with princes and never swerves off course. Constancy is the through line. He is the fixed thing you can steer by and swear on.

What he cannot do is appear. He has no parents in English, no wife, no death, no enemy, no single anecdote that survives in the language his worshippers spoke. The one-handed god, the wolf Fenrir, the fetter Gleipnir and the bitten-off wrist all belong to Icelandic Týr, written down centuries later and a sea away, and no English source knows any of it. His name is a common noun, his places were recorded by Norman clerks, his rune may be about a star, and his best inscription has been reassigned to a word for beer. The most complete English sentence about him puts him in a scene he has no business in, as a Roman idol in a Roman prison, refused by a Roman pope. It is the only time anyone in England wrote him into a story, and the story is not his.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Tiw in Anglo-Saxon mythology?

Tiw was the Anglo-Saxon god of war, known in Old English as Tīw, Tīg or Tī. Almost every direct attestation of his name is a gloss translating the Roman god Mars, which is how English sources identify him. No surviving English text tells a story about him or describes what he looked like.

Is Tiw the same god as the Norse Týr?

Tiw and Týr are the same god under the English and Norse forms of one inherited name, both from Proto-Germanic *Tīwaz. The famous Norse material, in which Týr loses his right hand to the wolf Fenrir, is Icelandic and was written down centuries later. No Old English source knows that story, so it is not part of the English record of Tiw.

Why is Tuesday named after Tiw?

Tuesday comes from Old English Tīwesdæg, meaning Tiw’s day, which translates the Latin dies Martis, the day of Mars. Late Germanic speakers matched their own war god to Mars and the calque stuck. The Old English version of the Rule of Benedict even uses Tīwesdæg to gloss the Church’s own term tertia feria, the third weekday.

Where was Tiw worshipped in England?

The evidence is in place-names rather than in buildings. Tuesley in Surrey is Tiw’s clearing, Tysoe in Warwickshire is the spur of land belonging to Tiw, and Tuesnoad in Kent and Tyesmere in Worcestershire mark his woodland and his pool. These names are clearings and water features, and there are notably fewer of them than for Woden or Thunor.

What does the Old English Rune Poem say about Tiw?

The poem’s stanza for the t-rune says that Tir is one of the signs, keeps faith well with noble folk, is always on its course above the mists of night, and never fails. Whether the stanza means the god is disputed, because Old English tīr also means glory, and the words for sign and course are used elsewhere for the zodiac and for a planet’s path. The rune’s name is written Ti, Tir and Tyr in different manuscripts.