The Myth of the Myth: Eostre

Around this time you’re going to see a lot of posts about how Easter is named after a goddess Ishtar. That’s completely ridiculous and has been dealt with by many people, who’ll often point out that it’s doubly ridiculous because in English Easter actually is named after a pre-Christian goddess, Eostre.

I’ve never been one to be interested in what everyone else is doing, so I’ll leave the Ishtar story to others. But is the second part true?

Well, if you go to The Dictionary of Old English from the University of Toronto (subscription required), it flat out says the “derivation of the name from a pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon festival of a goddess Eastre is no longer accepted.” (don’t read too much into the Eastre spelling difference. Best guess is it’s a dialect thing.)

So what’s going on.

All we directly know about Eostre is contained in a couple sentences from the 8th century Venerable Bede, where he says, in one translation:

“Eosturmonath has a name which is now translated ‘Paschal month,’ and which was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month. Now they designate that Paschal season by her name, calling the joys of the new rite by the time-honoured name of the old observance.”¹

And that’s literally it. Is she a spring goddess? A fertility goddess? A dawn goddess? Anything that’s not in those two sentences is either a complete invention or a theory based on other evidence.

Which naturally has led to the question of whether Eostre is an invention of Bede to explain the name.

That’s not an unreasonable theory. Many people today invoke the goddess Ishtar as the origin of the English term Easter, and that’s pretty demonstrably untrue. So people do sometimes invent relationships with other deities.

And Bede might not be entirely reliable. He names one month as basically sol month, which looks like it should be either sun month or mud month . . . and he identifies it as meaning cake month. Which I’m struggling to find an actual scholar who thinks that has any validity (note, Wiki says that sol did mean a form of cake and Bede has been vindicated, but this is uncited and most blogs evidently take from Wiki. At BEST it’s an unattested cake that looked muddy.)

The traditional argument for Eostre has been that the thoroughly Christian Bede didn’t have a motivation to invent a non-Christian goddess. And, if he was going to invent a goddess, surely he’d do better than Eostre? People say that Odin or Thor is the model for Santa Claus (this is profoundly unlikely, but that’s a post for a later time), not Hœnir or Bragi. People who are making up stories tend to fixate on the primo gods, not the extremely obscure ones.²

Though that’s not enough, so later scholars³ saw that there was an old German name for the month/holiday that looked reasonably like Easter and decided there was an unattested pan-Germanic goddess, probably associated with the dawn because it seems to be related to the word . . . east. Where the sun comes up.

That would be appealing because many Indo-European mythologies have dawn goddess figures with names that could be related to Eostre. But many people remain unconvinced. Ignoring the controversies surrounding Proto-Indo-European mythology, Germanic languages (like English) tend not to use the same terms for East as for Dawn. So even if she’s linguistically comparable to other Indo-European dawn goddesses, there’s no reason to suspect she herself is a dawn goddess.

Beyond that, the major stumbling block for the pan-Germanic goddess theory has always been the singular Bede attestation. If this is a goddess worshiped everywhere . . . where is she?

Norse mythology has a dwarf named Austri, but that’s a dwarf — not a goddess. The German name evidence isn’t that great because Easter isn’t the name in most Germanic languages, which tend to prefer the more conventional derivation from pascha/pesach (or similar)⁴. It’s very possible that the German name’s similarity is down to English missionaries being major figures in the Christianization of modern Germany who may have just brought their name for the holiday with them. Though even if that is the case it’s not impossible that there were some collection of circumstances that allowed Eostre to survive in England longer than anywhere else in the Germanic world.

In the 1950s a collection of altar stones and fragments were discovered in Germany that date to 150–250 AD/CE, or centuries before Bede. These stones reference the Matronae Austriahenae, and that second element certainly looks related to Eostre. That doesn’t necessarily mean a pan-Germanic goddess, just that the idea isn’t impossible, or even that the naming system isn’t unknown to Germanic peoples. The anti-Eostre side argues that the assumption chain has to be so long (that these COULD be a reference to a goddess that COULD be related to Eostre that COULD . . .) that it’s only evidence if you want it to be evidence. Even worse, as Stephen Winick points out at the Library of Congress,

“the Matronae Austriahenae are triple goddesses for whom it was customary to leave votive inscriptions on stone, while Eostre is a single goddess to whom no inscription has ever been found. In other words, these two goddess concepts have no known attributes in common, and therefore don’t seem to be closely related. Therefore, most scholars are not convinced of the connection.”

OK, how about place names? Again, it can be debatable. Some flat out say there’re are no attested place names named after Eostre. [PDF]

Now, someone who did a brief read over of the Wikipedia article might comment ‘umm, what about Eostrefeld?’ (modern Austerfield). Wiki does at least heavily imply that this is named after Eostre, but their own source says that’s just not the case and it derives from eowestre⁵, which means sheepfold (a sheep enclosure.)

Prominent Eostre scholar Philip Shaw does argue there are some place names that do derive from Eostre, like Eastry in Kent, as part of his theory is that it’s a localized Kentish goddess, but that’s not the conventional etymology for Eastry. The conventional etymology is East. And another Eostre scholar named Richard Sermon argues that Shaw’s evidence for Eastry’s etymology is overly selective and ignores evidence that casts doubt on the idea. And if it IS a localized goddess that throws up a lot of very awkward questions, like how the name goes national with seemingly little controversy.

Personal names are likewise unclear. There’s an attested abbot in England named Easterwine, whose name might either be follower of Eostre or Eastern friend. Shaw thinks that the Eostre etymology is unworkable on linguistic grounds, Sermon argues that Germanic naming conventions all but require it to be some form of deity, and Eostre is as good an option as any.

OK, so what if we throw out Eostre entirely? There’s still this really weird English word Easter that needs some explaining. In 1959, Johann Knobloch proposed that the week after Easter was called hebdomada in albis, or white week, using the Latin for white, like albino.

It seems that in Vulgar Latin alba took the meaning of dawn, which is why many modern Romance languages have something like alba meaning dawn. Knobloch’s idea was that somebody got confused between the albis meaning of white and a Vulgar Latin plural of dawn and translated it with a dawn word, like eostre.

Another idea by Jürgen Udolph is that it’s somehow related to an Old Norse word ausa, which means sprinkling or pouring. Then that might have become associated with baptismal rites around Easter, making the etymology more like ‘baptism season.’

The problem in both cases is a lack of any corroborating evidence. There’re precious few if any other examples of Germanic Language speakers confusing the Latin for white with the theorized Vulgar Latin for dawn, and plenty of examples of them not being confused. And an eighth century German glossary has different entries for Easter (Ostarun) and baptism (tauffi), which suggests against Udolph’s idea that they conflated Easter and baptismal rites.

Ronald Hutton says it’s not impossible to imagine it means month of openings or month of beginnings, while Peter Gainsford on his (always brilliant) KiwiHellenist blog speculates that the name of the month might be derived from the Spring Equinox.

In general the idea would be the month received its name for some reason, Bede was confused⁶ or engaging in the long-standing practice of inventing an etymology and thought it must be a goddess. But then we’re back to much earlier and the argument that if he was inventing a goddess, surely he’d pick a famous one?

The point isn’t one side of the argument is better than the other — I’m a researcher, not a scholar, hence I report opinions and do not invent opinions — it’s that Eostre belief in the scholarly community exists on a spectrum from ‘totally real, totally widespread’ to ‘figment of Bede’s imagination’ and most everywhere in-between. So when you see blogs or videos or whatever that confidently take a stand, know that they’re positioning themselves somewhere along that spectrum. Then ask yourself why they chose that position. Did they position themselves after careful weighing of the evidence and deciding that they felt that was the most logical position, or did they stake out a particular position because their pre-existing biases told them to? Nine times out of ten you’ll find it’s the latter.

Further reading: Easter: A Pagan Goddess, a Christian Holiday, & Their Contested History by Richard Sermon

Pagan goddesses in the early Germanic world. Eostre, Hreda and the cult of matrons by Philip A. Shaw

Edited after publication to add sources

1. Some people slightly quibble with that translation and argue that it should really be that Eostre gave her name to Eosturmonath, then because Easter usually fell in Eosturmonath the main Christian holiday was given a worn-down version of the months name. In that case it’s only indirectly named after the goddess. As nothing in this post particularly relies on that, I’m choosing to ignore it.
2. That’s not entirely true . . . but I tend to find that when people create a story using an obscure god there’s usually an underlying reason for it. A bad translation, poor formatting (seriously. I have seen extremely popular YouTubers talk about the attributes of a goddess and the origin of the story comes down, basically, to poor comma usage in a major translation). Actually, that would help explain Eostre if he felt that it MUST be a goddess and so invented it.
3. Most everyone will say Jacob Grimm. That’s both correct and a gross oversimplification. Grimm is by far the most important figure, but people had been poking around the edges of a German cognate for ages by then.
4. Though it’s an I think underdiscussed fact that English’s closest relative — Scots — does use a derivative of Pesach.
5. Should Old English words be italicized? On the one hand they’re not understandable to modern speakers, on the other it is English, just an old stage of English. Debates.
6. If we’re to believe Shaw’s idea that Eostre was a localized goddess he might have heard this name from a Kentish source, but on this I do agree with Sermon that that explanation is presupposing a lot of stuff. Bede definitely had a Kentish source for information — he tells us this — but he also had sources from across England. There’s also a long-standing argument that Bede might have known about Eostre from older family members who would have still had memories of Pagan England. So to say that he learned of Eostre from a Kentish source, assumed a false etymology, and went with it is to assume that the Kentish Eostre existed, which is not a conceded fact. And, personally, if that were true wouldn’t you expect that Easter as a name would be controversial in Kent? If the rest of the country just views it as a generic term that’s fine, but in Kent I’d have thought that you’d be seeing some level of taboo avoidance.