At a basic level, both surface tension and viscosity are the result of forces between particles. Usually we'd talk about intermolecular forces, because liquids are usually molecules, but obviously that doesn't work for mercury, which isn't made of molecules at all. Stronger forces between particles give higher surface tension, and usually also higher viscosity. So water's fairly high surface tension is usually credited to hydrogen bonding, and mercury's exceptionally high surface tension is put down to metallic bonding; while the increasing viscosity of aliphatic hydrocarbons with more carbons is said to be due to increasing London dispersion forces.
It's easy to see that the two are poorly correlated, though. Ethanol has almost identical surface tension to acetone, for example, but it's more than three times as viscous. Most strikingly, mercury has really extraordinarily high surface tension, but is no more viscous than cold water.
Is it completely wrong to expect at least some kind of loose correlation between surface tension and viscosity? Is viscosity just a far more complex phenomenon, a proper explanation of which lies way beyond the hand-wavy school science that chemistry teachers use to give a vague idea about things like trends in the alkanes? Would it be better to emphasise entanglement of long molecules when trying to explain the viscosity of longer alkanes, rather than just stronger forces?
Is mercury's low viscosity mainly down to its small particle size, or is there much more to it than that?