Ēostre or Ostara (Northumbrian Old English: Ēostre; West Saxon Old English: Ēastre; Old High German: *Ôstara) is a goddess in Germanic paganism who, by way of the Germanic month bearing her name (Northumbrian: Ēosturmōnaþ; West Saxon: Ēastermōnaþ; Old High German: Ôstarmânoth), is the namesake of the festival of Easter. Ēostre is attested solely by Bede in his 8th-century work De temporum ratione, where Bede states that during Ēosturmōnaþ (the equivalent to the month of April) feasts were held in Eostre's honor among the pagan Anglo-Saxons, but had died out by the time of his writing, replaced by the Christian "Paschal month" (a celebration of the resurrection of Jesus).
By way of linguistic reconstruction, the matter of a Proto-Germanic goddess called *Austrō has been examined in detail since the foundation of Germanic philology in the 19th century by scholar Jacob Grimm and others. As the Germanic languages descend from Proto-Indo-European (PIE), linguists have traced the name to a Proto-Indo-European goddess of the dawn *H₂ewsṓs (→ *Ausṓs), from which descends the common Germanic goddess that Ēostre and Ostara are held to descend. Scholars have linked the goddess' name to a variety of Germanic personal names, a series of location names in England, over 150 2nd century BCE Matronae (the matronae Austriahenea) inscriptions discovered in Germany, and have debated whether or not Eostre is an invention of Bede's, and theories connecting Ēostre with records of Germanic Easter customs (including hares and eggs) have been proposed. Ēostre and Ostara are sometimes referenced in modern popular culture, and are venerated in some forms of Germanic Neopaganism.
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