From Easter to Ostara: the Reinvention of a Pagan Goddess?

Abstract

In most European languages the Christian festival of the Resurrection has a name derived from the Hebrew word Pesach for the Jewish Passover, when Jesus was said to have been crucified. However, in English and German the festival goes by a very different name: Easter and Ostern. This was first explained in AD 725 by the Northumbrian monk Bede, who wrote that Easter takes its name from an Anglo-Saxon goddess called Eostre. In 1835, Jacob Grimm proposed that the German equivalent Ostern must have derived from the name of the same goddess, whose Germanic name he reconstructed as “Ostara.” More recently it has been suggested that Bede was only speculating about the origins of the festival name, although attempts by various German linguists to find alternative origins have so far proven unconvincing. Nevertheless, there may be a more direct route by which Ostern could have entered the German language. Much of Germany was converted to Christianity by Anglo-Saxon clerics such as St Boniface (C.AD 673–754), who could have introduced the Old English name Eastron during the course of their missionary work. This would explain the first appearance of Ostarun in the Abrogans, a late eighth-century Old High German glossary, and does not require any complex linguistic arguments or the existence of a Germanic goddess Ostara.