From: João S. Lopes Filho
Message: 11296
Date: 2001-11-20
----- Original Message -----
From: Christopher Gwinn <sonno3@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Monday, November 19, 2001 9:57 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Saving Hengist and Horsa
>
> > 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).
>
> I have serious doubts about H&H's existence - even if there were two
> men named Hengist and Horsa, I would suspect they had taken on these
> names in order to identify themselves with pre-existing Germanic
> horse twins (after all, we already have Tacitus' comments that some
> Western Germanic people worshipped divine twins that were very much
> like Castor and Pollux).
>
> There is a book on the subject (which I have not read yet, but am
> told that it is a good title):
> Donald Ward, "The Divine Twins. An Indo-European Myth in Germanic
> Tradition",1968.
>
> What would you make of the tradition that H&H had a sister named
> Swanna ("Swan")? Seems to me that there are enough parallels between
> the stories surrounding H&H and Divine Twins in Greek, Vedic, and
> Baltic sources to seriously consider that H&H were divine twins
> themselves. There also seems to be some reflexes of the divine twins
> in other Germanic tales, I believe (perhaps in the story of
> Sunild/Swanhilda and her avenging brothers).
>
> - Chris Gwinn
>
>
>
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