From: stlatos
Message: 66640
Date: 2010-09-23
>history ..."
> 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).
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> 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:
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>This arguments makes assumptions including that it would be too short a time from arrival to the first written records of H and H for Gmc twin gods to become historical founders. This ignores that the very thing had happened centuries earlier with the brothers who supposedly crossed the Baltic Sea to found * Gutiskaandya+ (Gdan'sk), sons of Gambara (prob. the goddess w etym. > or < Gambrivi and Gepidae; = Gefjun = Freyja). They likewise could be said to have a character including "nothing divine or even particularly heroic".
> http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/bede-book1.html
> 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:
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> "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."
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> 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.
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> Piotr