because we have no historical record of indigenous german religion besides the language, which we can trace back to pie roots, it doesn't matter what the source of the stories about eostre are. the christians destroyed everything. we are left with the need for poetic license.

the idea left behind is clear enough.

what we know from the linguistics, which are indisputable, is that the german eostre was the same god as the greek eos, the roman aurora, the vedic usas, the lithuanian ausrine, etc. this god exists in all of the indo-european pantheons, including the german, as eoster, which we retain as easter. there is some direct evidence of this in the form of linguistically similar mother goddess worship in spain, france and germany, but the evidence is weak and indirect and not very important.

it is more useful to try to reconstruct eostre from the greek, roman, vedic and slavic traditions than to try to find it in the pre-roman destruction horizon. the roman/christian genocide of the celtic and germanic peoples was pretty thorough.

this is a video about eos. it doesn't directly mention eostre, but the linguistic pie reconstruction is neither controversial nor disputable.

this is where the word comes from.

this is a video on aurora, which is the roman version of the same god: