Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/456

448 existence are W. Grimm, Wackernagel, Sinrock, and Wolf. On the other hand, Weinhold rejects the idea on philological grounds, and so do Heinrich Leo and Hermann Oeser. Kuhn says, "The Anglo-Saxon Eostre looks like an invention of Bede"; and Mannhardt also dismisses her as an etymological dea ex machina.

The whole question turns, as Oberle says, upon Bede's credibility, with regard to which one is inclined to agree with Jacob Grimm, that it would be uncritical to saddle this eminent Father of the Church, who keeps Heathendom at arms' length and tells us less of it than he knows, with the invention of this goddess. Moreover, the Christianising of England began at the end of the sixth century, and was completed about the end of the seventh, and as Bede was born in 672, he must have had opportunities of learning the names of heathen goddesses who were hardly extinct in his lifetime.

But however this may be, whether there ever was a goddess named Eostre, or not, and whatever connection the hare may have had with the ritual of Saxon or British worship, there are good grounds for believing that the sacredness of this animal reaches back into an age still more remote, when it probably played a very important part at the great Spring Festival of the prehistoric inhabitants of this island. It appears not unlikely that the hare was originally a totem, or divine animal among the local aborigines, and that the customs at Leicester and Hallaton are relics of the religious procession and annual sacrifice of the god.

This hypothesis, startling as it appears, is supported by the concurrent testimony of several large groups of deep and widespread superstitions, some of which unquestionably date from that primitive and barbarous condition of mind to which we owe the peculiar features of Totemism.