Eostre

Almost everything that can be said with confidence about Eostre rests on one sentence. In his work On the Reckoning of Time (De Temporum Ratione, 725), the Anglo-Saxon monk Bede, explaining the old English month-names, writes that the month answering to April was called Eosturmonath, formerly named after a goddess of the Anglo-Saxons called Eostre, in whose honour feasts were held in that season; the name, he says, was afterwards kept for the Christian Paschal (Easter) month. That is the whole of the ancient evidence.

No myth, no image, no cult-site, no second early witness survives to tell us who Eostre was, what was done at her feasts, or how widely she was worshipped. Everything richer than Bede's brief remark is later reconstruction, and it is important to be clear that the picture of a great, well-known pagan spring festival is not something the sources actually supply.

The familiar image of Eostre owes most to the nineteenth century. In his Deutsche Mythologie (1835), Jacob Grimm took Bede's Eostre together with the Old High German month-name Ostarmanoth and inferred a common Germanic dawn- and spring-goddess he called Ostara, of whom, he admitted, no direct German record survived. Comparative linguists have since noted that the name is plausibly related to an inherited Indo-European dawn-goddess (reconstructed as H2ausos, ancestor also of Greek Eos and Latin Aurora), which lends Bede's notice some background credibility; but a linguistic root is not the same as attested worship.

Around Grimm's conjecture there grew, over the following century, an elaborate and largely imaginative picture of a pan-Germanic Easter goddess and her festival, repeated so often that it came to be taken for established fact. Scholars today treat Ostara as a reasonable reconstruction of a name, and the surrounding festival lore as modern myth-making rather than ancient testimony.

From Eosturmonath the English and German languages took the name of the Christian feast of the Resurrection, Easter (German Ostern), even though most European languages instead call it by a form of Pascha. This linguistic accident has fed a popular belief that Easter's eggs and hares descend from Eostre's pagan rites, but there is no ancient evidence for such a link.

The Easter hare first appears in German sources in the late seventeenth century (Georg Franck von Franckenau, 1682) as a folk-custom of no attested pagan pedigree, and decorated eggs have their own independent springtime and Christian associations; the confident claim that a hare was Eostre's sacred animal is a modern embellishment. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, adherents of modern Heathenry and the reconstructed English tradition known as Fyrnsidu have chosen to honour Eostre in spring, understanding this, at their most careful, as a contemporary revival built upon a single ancient sentence rather than an unbroken inheritance.