Grimm's Ostara and the Modern Reconstruction

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.