Hengist and Horsa are semi-legendary, but
certainly not mythical. For one thing, despite their horsey names they have no
As'vin-like prototypes in the Germanic tradition and there is nothing divine or
even particularly heroic about them. They were military leaders who merely
happened to be at the right time and place to make history. The Jutes
ascribed to them a mythical pedigree making them "the sons of Victgilsus,
whose father was Vecta, son of Woden", but that was what the kind of
conventional pedigree routinely claimed by the aristocratic families "of many
provinces" (as noted by Bede).
We have no independent proof of their
historicity, so everything depends on how much confidence we can place in Bede's
account of the Hengist and Horsa episode. Bede was a conscientious historian with the abundant library resources of
Northumbria at his disposal, and with scholarly contacts in various parts of
Britain as well as on the continent. He knew how to conduct painstaking research
and how to gather and evaluate historical evidence:
"My principal authority and aid in this
work was the learned and reverend Abbot Albinus; who, educated in the Church of
Canterbury by those venerable and learned men, Archbishop Theodore of blessed
memory, and the Abbot Adrian, transmitted to me by Nothelm, the pious priest of
the Church of London, either in writing, or word of mouth of the same Nothelm,
all that he though worthy of memory, that had been done in the province of Kent,
or the adjacent parts, by the disciples of the blessed Pope Gregory, as he had
learned the same either from written records, or the traditions of his
ancestors. The same Nothelm, afterwards going to Rome, having, with leave of the
present Pope Gregory, searched into the archives of the holy Roman Church, found
there some epistles of the blessed Pope Gregory, and other popes and returning
home, by the advice of the aforesaid most reverend father Albinus, brought them
to me, to be inserted in my history ..."
Bede never shows even the slightest
inclination to confabulate or patch the lacunae in his documentation with wild
guesses or fantastic interpolations. His scholarly integrity and critical
standards were quite amazing for the early Middle Ages. He certainly had moral
and religious purpose in mind when he encouraged his readers to draw
lessons from the Chronicle, but he nevertheless understood history as an
account of documented or at least plausible events:
"And I humbly entreat the reader, that, if
he shall in this that we have written find anything not delivered according to
the truth, he will not impute the same to me, who, as the true rule of history
requires, have laboured sincerely to commit to writing such things as I could
gather from common report, for the instruction of posterity."
Search as hard as you can, you will find no
examples of _translatio imperii_ or (to use that odious term again)
euhemerisation in Bede's chronicle. He did not steal plots from Classical
authors to reenact them with Germanic heroes. In the Chronicle he gives
absolutely plausible dates for everything he reports, and his chronology is
impeccably consistent -- after all, he had written two books on historical
dating and, as you certainly know, was the first historian to
use Dionysius' "Anno Domini" time scale. The Chronicle was the work of
his life. He was evidently proud of it and realised that he would be
chiefly remembered as its author -- otherwise why should he have put his
complete bibliography into it? I find no reason to distrust Bede as a
historian. He was born just about two hundred years after the Germanic invasion,
and the pre-Christian oral traditions of the conquerors were still fresh. There
is no 100% certainty that Hengist and Horsa had not been invented during those
200 years, but if Bede, with his eagerness to "remove all occasion of doubting
what [he] wrote", found sufficient reason to treat them as real people, I
would be surprised to find him fooled by unreliable sources.
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, November 19, 2001 3:56 AM
Subject: Re: [tied] Re: Vanir
However, I was
aghast at Rydberg's consigning Hengest to realms of fiction. Is there any
way He can be saved from this fate? I'd hate to have to mourn the founder
of my nation [one of em, anyroad] as well as the very divinity of my Gods!
You're an Anglicist, aren't you Piotr? Can you exonerate the founder of
England?