In the journey from Old English to what we write today, the ash (Æ) tended to metamorphose into a simple E and various "ae" forms got reduced to just "e": Ælfwyn became Elvin, Æthelræd became Ethelred, aether and aesthetic became ether and esthetic (except when @Cerb spells them), and so on. The distinction was simply planed off over the centuries. When there was no need for the superfluous Æ (because its sound was rendered with a single letter) it got dialed way down in frequency. The same thing happened, more or less, with the thorn (Þ, þ) and eth (Ð, ð) characters, because the th digraph supplanted them.
An even more obvious influence involved the printing press. In the early days of typography, fonts were imported from Germany and Italy, and those countries did not use the oddball English characters, so substitutes had to be found. "E" substituted quite nicely for the ash, and "Y" for the thorn (as we see on the signs in front of all those cutesy Ye Old Whatever shops).
Elaboration
Asked for citations, I lazily looked to the Web first, but real scholarship in this matter is difficult to Google. Here are some not-stringently-academic citations, together with a disclaimer.
The thorn was particularly popular as a sign for 'th' in Medieval English, but with the advent of printing came a problem. There was no thorn sign in the printing fonts, as they were usually cast outside of England. So, since the sign for thorn slightly resembled the lower-case 'y', that's what was substituted.
The thorn continued to be used, but printing caused its eventual demise from the English alphabet. As mentioned earlier, lingering proof of its existence hangs on in the outmoded 'Ye'.
Thorn — Missing Letter of the Alphabet (reposted with correct glyphs here).
Ultimately, the letter was abandoned when printing began to streamline the alphabet and eliminate unnecessary letters. Æ was separated into AE, and the language moved on. However, you can still find ash used stylistically in names like Encyclopædia Britannica and ÆON.
Mighty Markup.
Disclaimer: I feel it only fair to point out that the reference books I have at hand (printed versions, so no linky-link), suggest that the ash (or æsc in OE), was pretty much gone by 1250 due to the influence of Norman French. This was a couple hundred years before the invention of the printing press, so we cannot accept that as the proximal cause. Still, Gutenberg almost certainly put the nail in the coffin of that and the other oddball characters (including wynn and yogh — look those up for your amusement and edification sometime).
In Old Norse, Ratatoskr means "drill-tooth" or "bore-tooth". It is the name of a mythical creature, a squirrel that runs up and down the tree of life called Yggdrasil, acting as a messenger between two arch enemies: the great eagle and the terrestrial dragon.
According to Albert Sturtevant, "[as] far as the element Rata- is concerned, Bugge's hypothesis has no valid foundation in view of the fact that the [Old Norse] word Rata (gen. form of Rati*) is used in Háv[amál] to signify the instrument which Odin employed for boring his way through the rocks in quest of the poet's mead [...]" and that "Rati* must then be considered a native [Old Norse] word meaning "The Borer, Gnawer"
Wikipedia
One can therefore assume that the word rat stems from a description of its behaviour.
Best Answer
The names of the week were originally Roman according to the Oxford English Dictionary:
For example, Tuesday was originally named after Mars, but then switched to Tiw:
When the days were renamed, Mars was equivalent to Tiig (Tiw):
The OED also notes that the Germanic people would have originally used the Roman names, but then subsequently changed them (by Old English, Mars didn't factor into Tuesday at all):
There is no further note on why Saturday was allowed to remain a reference to Saturn, however.