Who is Eostre?

I have to confess that many years ago when I first heard the name Eostre I hadn’t seen it written down so mis-spelled it as “Oestre” –  in my mind the well known hormone oestrogen, connected as it is with fertility, made perfect sense at this season of growth and renewal.  But it turned out to be a case of what linguists call a “false friend”: in fact “oestrogen” derives from Greek “oistros”, meaning mad desire and “gennan”: to produce. Sounds like it might be more fun than chocolate eggs!

Despite being an amateur linguist I couldn’t imagine where the name Eostre or the alternative Ostara came from. Eventually my search led back some thirteen hundred years to the prolific writer known as the Venerable Bede (672 – 735 CE), a monk at Jarrow in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumberland. In one of his books, De Temporum Ratione (The Reckoning of Time), he set out to determine the proper dates for Christian observances, writing, in his chapter on the English Months:

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.[i]

Many writers since have claimed that this is all nonsense: Bede must have made up the goddess to explain Eosturmonath, although others came to his defence, with Jacob Grimm (1785 – 1863), the folklorist and linguist writing:

“Ostará, Eástre seems therefore to have been the divinity of the radiant dawn, of upspringing light, a spectacle that brings joy and blessing, whose meaning could be easily adapted to the resurrection-day of the christian’s God.”[ii]

Eostre certainly seems to have an etymological connection with “east”, which would likely make her a goddess of the dawn – and goddesses of the dawn are everywhere in Indo-European mythology, with Usas, who ensures cosmic order, the most important goddess featured in the Rig Veda. The relationship between Usas, Roman Aurora, Greek Eos and Eostre is clear enough to linguists – many of whom, however, don’t trouble to mention that each of these words is the name of a goddess of the dawn! Spring can certainly be seen as the dawning of the year and so Eosturmonath – April – gave Bede the name of an equivalent goddess for Anglo-Saxon England.

Kathleen Herbert also supported Bede, writing: “Eostre was the goddess of the dawn and also of the spring equinox… After the equinox the sun annexes more and more of the kingdom of the night, the time is to the year what full sunrise is to the day”.[iii]

But the world had to wait a very long time before more evidence supporting Bede’s claim came to light: in 1958 over 150 votive inscriptions were discovered in a small geographical area of Germany, not far from Cologne. These were to deities named the matronae Austriahenae (which can be translated as the Eastern Mothers) and dated to between 150-250 CE. And linguists recognised that Austr  – the first part of Austriahenae –  can be etymologically linked to Eostre, both deriving from words for east.[iv]

Eostre, then can be acknowledged a goddess of the dawn and of the spring equinox and thus necessarily of fertility, and most of today’s Christians are perfectly aware that Easter eggs and bunny rabbits have far more to do with fertility than the resurrection of Christ. And the connection of eggs to spring is much older than the chocolate eggs appearing on supermarket shelves from January onwards. Painting and dyeing eggs has been practiced for a very long time indeed, with one cache of decorated ostrich eggs found in South Africa dated to between 55,000 and 65,000 years before the present. Eggs were also highly decorated in much of Eurasia, while the earliest Western European example of a decorated hen egg was found in a tomb in Germany and dated to the 4th century CE. In Britain and Scandinavia a leaf or flower would be placed on an egg, which was then wrapped in onion skins and boiled, resulting in an egg with the leaf or flower pattern – in Britain these were called “pace eggs”, used for gifts and also as payment to performers of Easter folk plays (with the name “Pace” deriving from Pascha, Latin for Easter).[v]

But what is the connection to rabbits and hares? Things become confusing here!

Steven Winick traced American folklore back as far as the late 19th century, noting that in Pennsylvania toy rabbits or hares were given on Easter morning, with the explanation to the children that the Osh’ter hâs – the Easter hare – laid the Easter eggs. It’s unlikely the children were told the rest of the tale: that the hare was originally a bird but was changed into a hare by the goddess Ostara, and in gratitude the hare lays eggs for the goddess on her feast day.[vi]

Well, that helps a little to understand the stories of egg-laying hares I’ve come across in odd places and after reading a comment on Winick’s post I finally got it! Hares don’t burrow but build a nest form in tall grass. Birds will often use this to lay their eggs so that if the bird is later chased off then a hare may well be found apparently sitting on an egg![vii]

Hares, incidentally, were probably introduced to Britain in Roman times, if not earlier[viii], with rabbits coming along later, introduced by the Normans[ix], and these late introductions may explain why we don’t appear to have any English goddesses associated with hares – in fact, I can’t think of many deities associated with hares. Aphrodite and Eros were both depicted with them, and Artemis was the protector of new-born hares (leverets). Wenet was a hare-headed goddess in Egyptian religion, known as “the swift one”.

But although we appear to lack an English Spring Equinox goddess, that certainly isn’t the case in Wales where we have Melangell, of whom I’ve written before[x]: Melangell is said to have been the daughter of an Irish king who wanted to marry her off for political expedience, but she had decided on lifelong virginity and fled to Wales where she took refuge in the beautiful Tanat Valley, near Llangynog in Powys, living there quietly for years. But then one day Brochwel Ysgithrog, Prince of Powys, happened to be hunting hares nearby. A terrified hare had taken refuge under Melangell’s skirts and, moved on hearing the young woman’s story, the prince gifted her this portion of his land and forbade the hunting of hares upon it. Melangell, known in Latin as St Monacella, is now the patron saint of hares, rabbits and the natural environment. It’s said that she cared for the people of the area and was joined by other young women wishing to remain virgin and help with the healing of local people who would come to the place now known as Pennant Melangell for help. Brochwel went on to become king of Powys and his date of death, thought to be around 560 CE, helpfully gives us an idea of when Melangell was active.

Melangell is considered a saint – but then, so is Brigid and there are a number of similarities in their backgrounds and stories – so why not honour Melangell at the Equinox as well? After all, if Eostre hadn’t existed, perhaps it would have been necessary to invent her.

Geraldine Charles
March 2025

[i] Trans: Faith Wallis (1999). Bede: The Reckoning of Time. Liverpool University Press.

[ii] Grimm, J. (1966). Teutonic Mythology (Trans. James Steven Stallybrass, Ed.). Dover.

[iii] Herbert, K. (1994). Looking for the Lost Gods of England. Anglo-Saxon Books.

[iv] Shaw, P. A. (2011). Pagan Goddesses in the Early Germanic World. Bristol Classical Press.

[v] Hall, S. (2016, April 6). The Ancient Art of Decorating Eggs. Folklife Today: American Library of Congress Blogs. < https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2017/04/decorating-eggs/>

[vi] Winick, S. (2016, April 28). Ostara and the Hare: Not Ancient, But Not As Modern as some Skeptics Think. Folklife Today: American Library of Congress < https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2016/04/ostara-and-the-hare/>

[vii] Reader Stéphanie Sheen’s comment on the above blog entry (29 March 2017) 

[viii]Brown Hare. (n.d.). The Wildlife Trusts < https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/wildlife-explorer/mammals/brown-hare>

[ix] Rabbit. (n.d.). The Wildlife Trusts < https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/wildlife-explorer/mammals/rabbit>

[x] Charles, G. (2021, March 1). The Fires of Spring. Goddess Temple of Bala < https://goddesstemplebala.co.uk/2021/03/03/the-fires-of-spring-spring-equinox-2021/>