Re: [tied] Saving Hengist and Horsa

There were no doubt later interpolations added in order to make the
H&H episode a better story -- like their having a sister and even
their being twins (neither "fact" is reported by Bede). I would not
exclude some deliberate Dioscurisation of H&H by mediaeval erudites.
It is at any rate quite possible that the choice of
alliterating "horse" names was motivated by older Jutish traditions,
if a Germanic pair of horse twins can indeed be reconstructed. Still,
I am inclined to accept the historicity of the brothers so named (or
at least of Hengist, granting the possibility that Horsa is merely
his ficticious "horse twin" invented by sycophantic genealogists) as
leaders of the Jutish mercenaries, given the short historical
distance -- four generations, or just a century -- between Hengist
and Ethelbert I, during whose reign the official genealogy of the
Oiscing dynasty, as transmitted to Bede by his Kentish collaborators,
was no doubt recorded at Canterbury.

Piotr

--- In cybalist@..., "Christopher Gwinn" <sonno3@...> wrote:


> 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