Easter is considered the most important festival in the Christian calendar, commemorating the resurrection of Christ, however the the word “Easter” itself didn’t begin with Christianity. There are a few potential origin stories.. It’s often said that Easter was named after a pagan fertility goddess — but the truth behind that is not nearly as settled as some believe.
The pagan fertility goddess theory comes from the work of the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon monk and scholar known as the Venerable Bede. In his Medieval Latin treatise De temporum ratione (“The Reckoning of Time”), Bede wrote that the English word “Easter” was derived from Eostre (or Eostrae), the name of an Anglo-Saxon goddess possibly associated with spring and fertility, in whose honor feasts were celebrated during the springtime.
Modern scholars, however, have questioned that claim. Encyclopaedia Britannica notes, “In the modern era the connection between Eostre and spring has been disputed; she may have been a local protective deity rather than a fertility figure.” The Oxford English Dictionary extends the dispute: “This explanation is not confirmed by any other source, and the goddess has been suspected by some scholars to be an invention of Bede’s.”
The problem is that Eostre is not mentioned in any other ancient writing, and there appear to be no shrines, altars, or documents testifying to her worship. It’s possible that Bede extrapolated the name of a goddess from the Old English name for the month of April, Ēastermōnað, potentially because some figure was celebrated during that month, and he wanted to name it.
So why do we call the Christian holiday Easter? In modern scholarly circles, there is now widespread consensus that the word comes from in albis, an ancient Latin phrase that is understood as the plural of alba (“dawn”). When it became connected to the Christian celebration of the resurrection of Christ, the word went through a transformation to become eostarum in Old High German, which later changed again to become the modern German Ostern and the English “Easter.” In other words, the name Easter may simply reflect, etymologically, the dawning of spring, during which the Christian resurrection festival fell — without the influence of any pagan goddess. The exact date of Easter changes every year, as it is celebrated on the Sunday following the first full moon after the northern spring equinox.
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