Is the Easter Bunny pagan? Probably not. It seems to have been invented by German-speaking Protestants sometime in the 1600s.

Bibliography:

Stephen Winick, “Ostara and the Hare: Not Ancient, but Not As Modern As Some Skeptics Think,” Library of Congress Blogs, April 28, 2016.

Stephen Winick, On the Bunny Trail: In Search of the Easter Bunny, Library of Congress Blogs, March 22, 2016

  • Lvxferre [he/him]English
    1·
    12 days ago

    Yup, the commenter raised the same points - but in a clearer way. (He even mentioned the matrons!)

    This is sounding a lot like a telephone game, to be honest:

    • Shaw - “I disagree with Grimm, since I don’t take linguistic evidence into account” →
    • Winick - “I’m trying to be succinct here so TL;DR this is a conjecture, not proven stuff” →
    • youtuber (dunno his name) - “this is all unsupported assumption!”

    Partially off-topic, but Interesting tidbit from the article:

    Moreover, a much simpler origin for the Old High German name of Easter has since been proposed: much of Germany was Christianized by Anglo-Saxon priests, who (as Bede tells us) already called Easter by a variant of the name, so they probably just brought the name for Easter with them, where it was adapted by Old High German speakers. [2]

    Bede’s hypothesis is clearly false: if Old High German borrowed the word for Easter from Anglo-Saxon dialects, the modern German word Ostern (Easter) wouldn’t start with /o:/, but rather some front unrounded vowel; it would be **Estern /e:/ or similar. That *au → ēa~ēo change you see in Old English is so old that it was certainly present in the speech of the Anglo-Saxon priests, OHG speakers would likely simplify the odd cluster into a simple /e:/ and call it a day.