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From: John Carmi Parsons< >
Subject: Hengist
Date: 6 Sep 1998 09:34:53 -0700
The best available account of the early Anglo-Saxon settlement, Barbara
Yorke's _Kings and Kingdoms of Early Anglo-Saxon England_ (London:
Routledge, 1990), pp. 3-4, 15, 26, 74, describes Hengist and his "brother"
Horsa as almost certainly fabrications--that is, they never existed.
Yorke points to the prevalence, in the foundation stories of the Anglo-Saxon
kingdoms, of elements that recall the similar foundation legends of Norse
and other Indo-European peoples. Most particularly, she singles out the
frequent appearance in these stories of groups of near kinsmen whose names
all begin with the same letter--the obvious examples here being "Cerdic"
and "Cynric" of Wessex. She also notes that in many of the stories told
of these early Anglo-Saxon conquerors, the names given for the native
British kings they defeated are often suspiciously like the names of the
regions these British kings supposedly governed: "Cerdic" and "Cynric," for
example, are said to have defeated a British king named Natanleod after whom,
according to the _Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_, the district known as
"Natanleaga" took its name. Yorke points out, however, that this region
in Hampshire is quite marshy and very probably gets its name from the old
English word "naet," which means "wet." In other words, the name of King
Natanleod was coined from the region, and not vice versa.
Finally, Yorke emphasizes that all the chronicle sources from which these
foundation stories derive were written some centuries after the fact, and
in a predominantly oral culture, considerable allowance must be made for
the inevitable embroidery of these stories as they passed from teller to
teller. These foundation stories are one of the many cases in which, as we
come through history, each writer seems to know more about his subject than
did the writer who preceded him. In other words, the writers make up just as
much (if not more) than the oral tale-tellers did. The exception, of course,
was Bede, venerable for more than one reason, who was always careful to tell
his readers whenever he was recording something that he had only heard by
report and that he could not verify. As Yorke remarks (p. 3) the Hengist
and Horsa story is precisely one of those moments in Bede's history when
he says exactly this.
John Parsons
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