Our Easter tree this year is made from my ‘social distancing stick’ instead of the traditional pussy willow (which we couldn’t find). As always my girls wanted to know ‘why eggs and rabbits?' I normally ramble about symbols of new life. This year I decided to do some digging. 1/7

Nineteenth-century children in Germany and among the Pennsylvania ‘Dutch’ were given toy hares made of flannel on Easter morning, and told that the Easter Hare (German: Osterhase) had laid the eggs. 2/7

By the late nineteenth-century, folklorists had sourced a proper ‘back story’ for this tradition (see this excellent post by Stephen Winnick of @librarycongress on how it happened) https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2016/04/ostara-and-the-hare/ 3/7

According to this 'tradition' the pagan goddess Eostre had once found a bird with frozen wings, and turned into a hare so it could live safely on the ground. But the bird-turned-hare could still lay eggs, and every year it laid brilliantly colored eggs to celebrate her festival.

But Eostre is a shadowy figure at best. In 1835 Jokob Grimm (of fairy-tale fame) suggested that the name Easter German: Ostern) came from the name of the Celtic goddess Eostre/Ostara/Austra. Grimm gives as his source a treatise on time by the 8th century English monk Bede. 4/7

In his discussion of methods to fix the correct date for Easter, Bede, mentioned that Easter fell in a month, Eosturmonath, which he believed was named after the pagan goddess Eostre. History from Bede to Grimm lies silent on the topic of Eostre. 5/7 https://twitter.com/j_t_palmer/status/1248238136049664000

Alas, attempts to trace Eostre’s story lead only to a nineteenth-century game of Chinese whispers - even the hare is a confection. In 1874 Adolf Holzmann speculated that the hare might be Eostre’s sacred animal, similar to that of Abnoba, mother goddess of the Black Forest. 6/7

Abnoba was believed by the ancient Romans to be an indigenous name for the hunting goddess Diana, so the hare makes perfect sense. So the Hare is actually a hunting-hare, rather than a fertility hare! 7/7