One way to hold earthen is to look at its two parts. Earth is the ground, and the old ending -en means made of, the same ending that gives wooden and golden. So the picture to keep is simple: whatever this describes came out of the ground. Packed down as it is, it becomes a floor, a wall, a bank, a dam. Shaped and then , it becomes a pot, a jar, a bowl. And in older writing the same ground gets turned on people: bodies and pleasures are called earthen because they come from the dust and do not last.
From the word’s history
Wiktionary traces earthen to Middle English erthen and Old English eorþen, made of earth, from Proto-Germanic irthinaz, with Dutch aarden and German irden as cognates, and analyses it as earth plus -en, made of.
Wiktionary 把 earthen 追到中古英文 erthen、古英文 eorþen（土做的），再上溯到原始日耳曼語 irthinaz，並列出荷蘭文 aarden、德文 irden 為同源詞；拆解上就是 earth 加 -en（用某材料做的）。
packet evidence: Wiktionary etymology_text for earthen adj (source_ref kaikki:3f6f69a190036ae4:1155918135:15918)
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