> 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