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Ēostre or Ēastre (that is, Easter) is the name of an Anglo-Saxon goddess attested by the eighth-century Benedictine monk Bede's De temporum ratione ("On the Reckoning of Time").1 Bede describes the pagan worship of Ēostre among the Anglo-Saxons as having died out before the time he was writing. Ēostre is otherwise unattested. In 1835, Jacob Grimm referred to Bede when he proposed an equivalent Old High German name, Ostara, in his work Deutsche Mythologie. An amount of scholarly theory and speculation surrounds the figure.
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Etymology
The modern English term Easter developed from the Old English word Ēastre, which itself developed prior to 899.2 Bede states that the name refers to a goddess named Ēostre, who was celebrated at the Spring equinox. In the 19th century Hans Grimm cited Bede when he proposed the existence of an Old High German equivalent named ōstarūn, plural, "Easter" (modern German language Ostern). The Old English term Ēastre ultimately derives from ēast - meaning the direction of east. This suggests it originally referred to a goddess associated with dawn. Corresponding traditions occur with the Roman goddess Aurora and the Greek goddess Eos.3
Eostre is sometimes4 derived from the Proto-Germanic root *aew-s, "illuminate, especially of daybreak" and closely related to (a)wes-ter- "dawn servant", the dawn star Venus and *austrōn-, meaning "dawn, east" (compare Ostarrîchi "Eastern Realm, Austria"), cognate to the names of Greek Eos, Roman Aurora and Indian Ushas, all continuing Proto-Indo-European *Hausos.5
There is no certain parallel to Ēostre in North Germanic languages though Grimm speculates that the east wind, "a spirit of light" named Austri found in the 13th century Icelandic Prose Edda book Gylfaginning, might be related.
Bede's account of Eostre
According to Bede (c. 672 - 735), writing in De temporum ratione ("On the Reckoning of Time"), Ch. xv, De mensibus Anglorum ("The English months")6 the word "Easter" is derived from Eostre, an Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring, to whom Eostur-monath, corresponding to our month of April (Latin: Aprilis), was dedicated:
15. The English Months.
In olden time the English people – for it did not seem fitting to me that I should speak of other nations' observance of the year and yet be silent about my own nation's – calculated their months according to the course of the moon. Hence after the manner of the Hebrews and the Greeks, [the months] take their name from the moon, for the moon is called mona and the month monath.
The first month, which the Latins call January, is Giuli; February is called Sol-monath; March Hreth-monath; April, Eostur-monath; May Thrimilchi...
Eostur-monath 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.7
What is secure in Bede's passage is that the lunar month around the month of April in the Julian calendar was called Eostur or similar; In Vita Karoli Magni Einhard tells, that Charlemagne (c. 742 or 747 - 814) gave the months names in his own language and used 'Ostar-manoth' for April.8 Some critics who question Bede's account of a goddess suggest that "the Anglo-Saxon Eostur-monath meant simply 'the month of opening' or 'the month of beginnings'."9 This argument is perhaps bolstered by the fact that April is the first full month of the year in English calendars before the Gregorian system was adopted. "April" is of obscure etymology itself, but one of its origins is speculatively related to the Latin for "openings; beginnings", though it is also tied to Apur/Aphrodite, goddesses identified with the planet Venus. It should be noted that Old High German ōstarūn is plural, as it is in Aelfric's Hexameron: "And ne beoð næfre Eastron ær se dæg cume ðæt ðæt leoht hæbbe ða ðeostre oferswiðeð"10
German Ostara
The Old High German for "Easter" is ôstarâ or ôstrâ, most commonly attested in the plural form, as ôstarûn, ôstrûn, ôsteron, ôstron, ôsteren, ôstern, since the festival spanned several days (MHG ôsterwoche "Easter week"). Grimm mentions Easter Bonfires (Osterfeuer) as a long-standing German tradition, attested since 1559. The German word is cognate to Old English eostre, but there is no direct evidence that it had been a theonym.
In 1835, Jacob Grimm (1785–1863) published Deutsche Mythologie, a collection of German myths and oral histories, including a two-and-a-half page commentary on a goddess Ostara.11
Grimm recalls Bede's account of Eostre and states that it was unlikely that the man of the church would simply have invented a pagan goddess. Comparing the Anglo-Saxon eostur-monath with the Old High German term for Easter (ôstertagâ, aostortagâ and variants), he reconstructs an Old High German equivalent of the Anglo-Saxon theonym, ôstarâ:
This Ostarâ, like the AS Eástre, must in the heathen religion have denoted a higher being, whose worship was so firmly rooted, that the Christian teachers tolerated the name, and applied it to one of their own grandest anniversaries. (trans. Stallybrass)
Deutsche Mythologie had a strong impact in German Romanticism, and "Ostara" achieved high publicity with those people that were interested in the field, e.g. within Germanic mysticism. An instance of this is the magazine Ostara, that appeared in Vienna between 1905 and 1920. The editor and later exclusive contributor was Lanz von Liebenfels. Ostara is also one of the names of the mother-archetype in the psychology of Carl Gustav Jung.
References
- ^ Bede, De temporum ratione, Ch. xv, De mensibus Anglorum ("The English months")
- ^ Joseph Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, "Eástre, the goddess of the rising sun, whose festivities were in April. Hence used by Teutonic Christians for the rising of the sun of righteousness, the feast of the resurrection," noting Bede, Grimm 1855 (on-line text)
- ^ Barnhart, Robert K. The Barnhart Concise Dictionary of Etymology (1995) ISBN 0062700847
- ^ aus- The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000
- ^ Alexander Hislop speculated in his book The Two Babylons that the invading Germanic tribes borrowed the Greek goddess Eos, who eventually became their Eostre; Ronald Hutton states that: "Modern scholarship finds her name cognate with many Indo-European words for dawn, which presents a high possibility that she was a dawn-goddess, and so April as the Eostre-month was the month of opening and new beginning, which makes sense in a North German climate." (Cited after Adrian Bott, "Eostre: The Goddess Who Never Was?", White Dragon, Spring 2006); however, Hutton dismisses Eostre as a shadowy pre-Christian "Easter" festival in The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (Oxford University Press) 1996.
- ^ Bede, Caput XV: De mensibus Anglorum
- ^ Bede, Caput XV: De mensibus Anglorum
- ^ Vita Karoli Magni (Latin); English translation: Life of Charlemagne
- ^ Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun. A History of the Ritual Year in Britain, Oxford University Press, p. 180.
- ^ Noted as "a variant of Eastra, plural of the weak Eastre" by O. F. Emerson, "Notes on Old English" Modern Language Notes 38.5 (May 1923:pp. 266–272), p. p. 268.
- ^ For this section see: Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, Volume 1, Olms-Weidemann, 2003, p. 239-241 (German)
See also
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