Sparrows.
One who assists the souls of the dead to the afterlife.
Mercury and Odin are sparrows?
This isn’t getting any clearer to me.
Ah, okay. Thanks.
Sorry for the confusion, everyone. I did mean Sun OR Lord and Saturn OR Sabbath. I didn’t mean to imply that I thought they were the same thing.
And I have heard Friday being referenced to both Frigg and Freya. I mentioned Freya here because of the correlation with Venus, goddess of love and beauty.
Thanks for all the helpful responses, though it still doesn’t sound like there’s a definitive explanation for my question. Perhaps I shall ask the master himself, and see if Cecil can shed some light on this mystery!
Likewise, the phrase for “druid” in Hebrew is “Tree Priest” (sorry, I couldn’t find the Hebrew text on-line to copy it here, but it’s something like “aytz kohain” – Alessan, help us out here!). The on-line Hebrew translations I find are simply phonetic transcriptions of the word “druid”.
I learned that from a Hebrew edition of “Asterix and Cleopatra” that I have.
http://www.asterix.com/encyclopedia/translations/asterix-in-hebrew.html
I’d like to point out that there are two gods with similar names.
Chronos is the god of time. He is usually portrayed as an old, wise man and has been secularized as ‘Father Time’.
On the other hand, the titan Cronus is the early god of agriculture and is famous for his sickle with which he castrated his father, Ouranos the god of heaven. The Romans called this god, Saturn.
The Romans identified their god Saturn with the Greek Cronus, but the two are actually strikingly dissimilar. Saturn was a god of agriculture and plenty; the Saturnalia was in his honor, and he presided over the golden age. Cronus was a Titan who castrated and deposed his father, ate his own children, and was subsequently banished to Tartarus. They don’t seem to have had much in common, except that Cronus was the father of Zeus and Saturn was the father of his Roman counterpart, Jupiter or Jove.
Chronos (L. Chronus) is unrelated.
Um, why would there be a word for druid in ancient Hebrew? In modern Hebrew, the word is no doubt a calque on the etymology of druid, dru- “tree / oak tree” + -wid “knowing.”
ETA: I suppose rabbis in the Roman Empire might have wanted to discuss the religious customs of the Galatians, only a few hundred miles away, but if they did, they didn’t make it into the literary record.
Ah yes, thanks for pointing that out. I think I just read that he was the god of time somewhere while reading about this (I noticed it’s mentioned on Wikipedia) and didn’t think to check that. Strangely I don’t know much about Roman gods - I know the Greek ones far better - and didn’t even know who Saturn is equivalent to. But I did at least know the difference between Chronus and Cronus! 
I’m pretty sure that that’s a personal translation of the guy who did the comic (also, it would probably be “cohen etzim”). I’ve mostly just seen “druidim”.
Not in the sense of having any common pre-Greek Indo-European ancestor for the practice. The deity names for the seven days of the week are a Hellenistic Greek innovation that spread from them to neighboring civilizations, including India.
That’s because the Bengali names were derived from the corresponding Sanskrit ones (ravi, soma, mangala, budha, brhaspati, sukra, sani), which in turn were adopted in imitation of the weekday/deity associations in Greek astrology.
Indian astronomy/astrology/calendrics did not have the seven-day week or the associated-deity weekday names before the influence of Greek sources in the early common era.
I think it is possible that the Norse were not aware that Saturn is a planet. Because it moves so slowly against the background of the stars, its planethood is a good deal less obvious than that of the other naked eye planets, and it can easily be taken for no more than a bright star. I do not have a cite to hand, but I believe I have read that even among the early middle eastern civilizations (Mesopotamia, Egypt) who first codified astronomical and calendrical knowledge, and made the star/planet distinction, it was recognized to be a planet rather later than were Mercury, Venus, Mars and Jupiter, all of whose motions are more obvious.
I am not sure what implications this might have for the naming of the days, however.
No, the Norse (i.e., the Germans) did not name the days after the planets. The Romans had days named after the planets, sun, and moon, but the planets had the names of gods. When the Germans named the days, they used a calque, or loan translation, of the Latin names. For Sunday and Monday the Germans calqued the astronomical bodies (Latin dies Solis, or day of the sun, became English Sunday); for Tuesday through Friday the Germans calqued the names of the gods (Latin dies Jovis, or day of Jove, became English Thursday, or Thor’s day). But for whatever reason, probably because they thought there wasn’t a German equivalent, the Germans did not substitute one of their own gods when calqueing Latin dies Saturni.
I don’t know, and don’t know if anyone knows, what names the Germans gave to the planets 1500 years ago.
The question is not about how the Norse (or the Germans - hardly the same) named the days, but why we, in modern English, name some days after Norse Gods and others, Saturday in particular, after planets.
It’s because English is a Germanic language. Our core vocabulary, including the names of the days of the week, derives from earlier Germanic antecedents. My reference to “the Norse” was because of your error; we don’t actually care about the Norse.
The irony is that Saturn is the one planet that was dropped from the weekly lineup in Romance languages; they switched to sabato. Sabbath. So it makes a sort of symmetry. If Saturn was dropped by the post-Romans, at least it was adopted by the Teutons.
It’s still around in Welsh Sadwrn and Breton Sadorn, as well: not Romance languages, of course, but still direct borrowings from Latin during the Roman period.
I link all the days of the week, as with Sunday and Monday (read Moonday), to celestial bodies. Most people have seen a solar eclipse, and are probably aware that this happens as soon as the Moon moves in front of the earth’s observational point of the Sun. In the same way the Moon sometimes occults a planet, but more often occults a star. As a consequence of the inclination of the Moon’s orbit with respect to the ecliptic and the movement of the nodes of the Moon’s orbit, all the stars in a belt of 10° around the ecliptic are occulted at some time during a period of about nine years. Among these are the bright stars Aldebaran [Tuesday was named in honour of the Old Norse Tyr], Regulus [Wednesday, Wodan’s day, Wodan is the Germanic name for Odin], Antares [Thursday was named after the Old Norse god of thunder and lightning, Thor. Compare Old Norse Þorsdagr – Thor’s day, Old English Þunresdæg], Spica [Friday was named after Frigg, ‘fruit’ as in the Teutonic languages ‘Frucht’, and was thus also called Frïgedaeg in Old English] and the star cluster Praesepe [The stellar cluster Praesepe, also called the Beehive, forms part of the star sign Cancer. Saturday can thus possibly be linked to the Zodiac sign of Cancer, which is mythically referred to as the fourth hall Sokkvabekk ‘the descending stream’, a landscape of waterfalls where Saga (see The Ballad of Grimnir) and her father Odin daily went with golden cups to drink from the stream of remembrance. Saga, ‘saga’ from segja ‘tell’, was the goddess of history and second highest, after Frigg. How, then is it possible that Saturday became linked to Saturn? One can also ask whether Saturday was not at that time, as it has been for centuries past, the weekly bath day, as in the meaning of the Old Norse Saturday, Laugardagr and the Icelandic laugardagur, ‘Washing Day’. Also whether Satyr, the obscene god of the woods, was not implicated because men and women were all together at the bathing places.]
Why that particular order? It doesn’t seem to match the order of the importance, age, or power of the gods; the brightness of the planets; the apparent distance of the planets (based on how fast they move in relation to the stars), etc. What’s the deal?