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.