Why are rabbits associated with Easter? Any why are eggs involved? We take a look…
Among the many curiosities surrounding Easter, the close association with rabbits is perhaps one of the most well known, yet enigmatic. For a start these are not your run-of-the-mill rabbits but creatures that, although most definitely mammals, can rustle up a never-ending supply of eggs.
Where does the Easter bunny come from?
The answers lie in the fusion of Pagan celebration, the most important Christian festival of the year and the mythology surrounding rabbits, hares and bird’s eggs.
It can be tricky to unravel and rarely goes unchallenged.
The Pagan origins of Easter explain the rabbit part of the puzzle. Easter was the Anglo-Saxon name for the Germanic goddess Eostre, who was associated with spring and fertility and who was celebrated to ensure that crops were blessed. Spring, new life, fertility… it’s easy to see how rabbits – enthusiastic and prolific breeders that they are – became associated with these traditions.
But what about those eggs? Rabbits give birth to live young, as of course do their cousins, brown hares. One school of thought is that hares (but not rabbits) give birth overground, usually in grassy shallows known as forms.
Where brown hares give birth you may also find breeding lapwings, which lay their eggs in similar circumstances. So it is perhaps easy to see why our ancestors would believe eggs laid by lapwings – flighty, twitchy birds – did in fact come from their mammal neighbours.
Anglo-Saxon mythology may play another role in the great rabbit and egg mystery. It is thought that the hare was seen as sacred animal, particularly in springtime, while the goddess Eostre is said to have changed her pet bird into a rabbit to entertain a group of children. In turn the rabbit laid brightly coloured eggs for them.
The first references to the Easter Bunny are thought to originate around 1620 from the Alsace region on the French-German border. The first edible Easter Bunnies were made in the 1800s from pastry and sugar, a far cry from today’s chocolate creations.