Talk:Hengist and Horsa

Rewrite launched

For some time I've intended to rewrite this article. Recently I set out to do so, and, with the merging of the Hengest and Horsa articles into 'Hengist and Horsa', the rewrite is now live. Unlike the previous version, every line of the body is solidly referenced and the article is completely free of WP:SYNTH and WP:OR (no lines such as "that he is a Jutish mercenary in Hnaef's service is a very plausible hypothesis"—unattributed no less).

This rewrite is, however, not complete. First of all, there's more to be said about the two not covered in early British sources. For example, there is a Frisian folktale that relates that Hengist and Horsa had a sister whose name meant "swan," and this has aided in reconstructing Proto-Indo-European myth. This needs to be covered. Secondly, there's some business about heraldry that the previous article covers, but, like the Uffington White Horse figure, this needs to be dealt with fully. Third, the Finnesburg Fragment section needs to be expanded upon. Including Tolkien's theory and exploring further how Hengist and Aesc were combined together into a single tradition (for that matter, the fact that Aesc is also considered mythological should be handled to some extent).

If there's something I missed in the rewrite that I haven't mentioned above, please mention it here. I'd like to bring it into the article. My goal is to bring the article to GA (and even FA) standards, and, in the process, make this article the finest and most comprehensive article on these two important figures on the internet. :bloodofox: (talk) 01:28, 11 September 2009 (UTC)

Excellent work. I've made a few edits, nothing major. My major suggestion towards the push to Good Article status is to shorten the summaries of the HB and HRB material, they're very long and detailed for a discussion on these figures. --Cúchullain ^t/c 20:42, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

texts

Thank you. The Historia Brittonum and Historia Regum Britanniae sections are total summaries of their attestations. I wouldn't want to chop them up; I think they provide a service by showing exactly how the accounts have snowballed. If we need to compromise, maybe we can hide them behind a drop-down menu or something. :bloodofox: (talk) 04:11, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

Guidelines such as WP:PLOT and Wikipedia:Manual of Style (writing about fiction)#Plot summaries, as well as the proposed Wikipedia:Plot-only description of fictional works, speak against including such detailed plot summaries. I don't think anything would be lost by trimming it down. The Geoffrey section could easily discuss the embellishments he made without going into this level of detail. But otherwise the article is turning out quite nicely.--Cúchullain ^t/c 13:57, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks again! I'll take a look and see what I can summarize down in the account. I just need to make the time for it. :bloodofox: (talk) 00:31, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Very much like the second part of the article, but the extremely long summaries of texts don't really add anything useful. These could - and should - be briefly summarised in a paragraph or two with an external link for the interested reader. fluoronaut (talk) 18:46, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

I'll see what I can do as well.--Cúchullain ^t/c 14:24, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Images

Does anyone know where we can get some Hengist and Horsa images? To my surprise, and after some pretty decent searching, I've found very little. It would be great if we could get some more illumination for this article. :bloodofox: (talk) 02:12, 11 September 2009 (UTC)

When ever I read of Horse i think of the cordial Viking of Prince Valiant - maybe there's a free image of him out there?·Maunus·ƛ· 02:25, 11 September 2009 (UTC)

I must admit that I am not familiar with the character (nor the Prince Valiant comics, though I've caught a glimpse here and there). If you can provide a source directly indicating that the figure was inspired by Horsa then we can add some information about him to the "modern influence" section too. :bloodofox: (talk) 04:05, 11 September 2009 (UTC)

I have uploaded the image of Hengist and Horsa from Verstigan's Restitution of Decayed Antiquities. It's not all that exciting but it might be the earliest depiction of them. It's the earliest depiction of the White Horse flag in association with Kent. Æscing (talk) 17:55, 25 December 2009 (UTC)

Excellent, thanks! I've continued to find it very unfruitful to search for images of the two. Any usable images depicting the two that we can find are of value to this article. Do you know in what work the image you've uploaded was published? I'd like to find a higher resolution version. :bloodofox: (talk) 18:27, 25 December 2009 (UTC)

The image was first published in 1605 in a book called...wait for it..."A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities concerning the most noble and renowned English Nation" by Richard Verstegan. The library in my city actually had an original copy. It was weird, they brought it out to me on a plate with a latex glove and a pair of tongs. I didn't know whether to read it or eat it. You probably want to track down a copy, it must be the earliest scholarly work on Anglo-Saxon Heathenism. I pulled this image off the internet a couple of years ago when I was writing an article on the White Horse symbol for Runa. Unfortunately I have no record of what site it came from and google produces nothing, so this is all I have. The only way to get a higher resolution would be to track down a copy and scan it yourself, although I don't know if they'd even let you considering the most recent reprint was 1673. Æscing (talk) 08:09, 26 December 2009 (UTC)

Google Books has several copies of the work but, frustratingly enough, none of them are available for viewing for whatever reason. If any of them were, we could simply pull it from their scan but alas. Maybe someone out there can snap a stable, guerrilla photo of the image from a copy? I still find it very odd that there seem to have been so few depictions of the brothers given their important (yet quite legendary) role in English history. :bloodofox: (talk) 02:51, 27 December 2009 (UTC)

Horsenden and White Horse Stone

After a little skimming, it appears that Horsenden, a location, seems to be (or was) considered related to Horsa, but it's unclear what the current opinion on the matter is. This needs to be handled by the article. I'll see what I can dig up. Similarly, there's also the matter of the White Horse Stone, but this seems far more questionable. :bloodofox: (talk) 04:13, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

I can't help but notice that Horsenden is in Ayelsbury Vale, and Horsa died in Aylesford.

We know from the ASC that Horsa was killed in Ayelsford, and from Bede that Horsa was buried in East Kent and that there was a monument bearing his name. Both these sources fit in with the location of the WHS. Although the word he uses is "insigne" which I assume means inscribed with his name. I recall some scholarly theory that the name Horsa may be a misreading of a fragmentary Latin word on a Roman gravestone in the area.Æscing (talk) 20:40, 26 December 2009 (UTC)

The White Horse Stone definitely gets some attention these days and we definitely need a proper section handling this. I'm pretty sure I've read something similar somewhere... :bloodofox: (talk) 02:51, 27 December 2009 (UTC)

Horse and Stallion's sister, Swan

In modern Indo-European studies, it appear that it's generally held that Hengist and Horsa originally had a swan sister, which fits them into reconstructed Proto-Indo-European cosmological myth. Regarding Germanic paganism, Hengist and Horsa are considered a prime example of the evolution of this myth:

Early Germanic legends are salted with the appearances of Divine Twin-like heroes. For example the kingdom of Kent was founded by two Anglo-Saxon leaders named Hengist 'stallion' and Horsa 'horse', whose sister was named Swana 'Swan'. The consort rescue theme has been popularized in Germanic epic, notably in the jumbled skein of tales compromising the Volsunga saga and the Nibelungenlied. Historically, these epics build on the heroic sagas about famous figures and events dating from the period of Germanic migrations. Accreted to these are an array of themes and motifs drawn from folklore and myth, including the consort rescue theme. [...] (Plus there's plenty more interesting information at the source: [1])

There are a number of other results when looking for this swan sister, including a 19th century work posits a potential toponym after this swan-sister: [2]. Obviously, this is an extremely important element to bring into the article. But the issue is what are the sources for this sister? Does anyone know exactly where Swana is attested? Without this information, I don't yet feel comfortable bringing this crucial element into the article. :bloodofox: (talk) 02:42, 19 October 2009 (UTC)

I was searching a bit around earlier this year for this swan sister. The sources that might be of interest that I have found so far are texts by the historians Suffridus Petrus and Ocka Scharlensis. There is a book I'd like to get a hold of that seems to detail the sources of this, namely The divine twins: an Indo-European myth in Germanic tradition. I will come back with more information as soon as I find back to the books I searched out earlier this year. –Holt (T•C) 02:43, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

Excellent. It seems that we could use articles for both Suffridus Petrus and Ocka Scharlensis too, so maybe whatever we dig up can be used for producing articles on these figures. Very nice image find, by the way! We could use a lot more images for this article. It would be fantastic to find that these horse heads are actually still up somewhere.. I'd very much like to take some shots of them. :bloodofox: (talk) 06:39, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

Doing some digging around about information regarding Suffridus Petrus, I discovered this quote in a work by Edward Stillingfleet (1837, page 320):

Suffridus Petrus saith, "these people were called Angrivarii, and the country, Angria, which was subdued by Udolphus, father to Hengist and Horsa, and prince of Frisia; but their mother's name was Suana, daughter of Vectgistus, a great man about Hamburgh."Source: [3]

For this line, Stillingfleet references "De Orig. Fris. lib. ii. c. 15." One step closer? :bloodofox: (talk) 07:19, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

Well, that book has been digitized by Google but it's a bit confusing because it looks like chapter 15 is mislabeled as 14. But the chapter starts here: [4] A few pages in we get:

Habitabat ea tempestate prope Hamburgum præcipuæ nobilitatis satrapa Vetgistus, qui filios duos Hengistum & Horsum, & filiam unam nomine Svanam habebat. Filii in Albis mortui sunt. Udolphus dum, visendorum amicorum gratia Saxoniam in ressus, ad Vetgistum divertit, amore Svanæ correptus est, quam & cum parentum utrinque consensu uxorem duxit: patre deinde defuncto, anno Christi 360. septimus & ultimus dux Frisiæ inauguratus est; nam post hunc reges novem Frisiæ præsuerunt usque ad Carolum Magnum.

The book has a lot else to say about H&H. Haukur (talk) 09:42, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

Fantastic! So it seems that Suffridus Petrus is indeed the primary source for Swana. Now if we could just get a professional translation (if such a translation into English even exists for this work...). In other news, Ocka Scharlensis seems to be a dead end; he apparently doesn't mention a swan sister at all and reportedly mainly just follows Geoffrey of Monmouth's account. Some modern secondary sources treating this attestation are also important for treating this, especially one that outright says that this is where she is attested. The work that Holt mentions earlier in this conversation seems to do exactly that, yet unfortunately I can only see a snippet view, and only in the search results is this confirmed. The work is Ward, Donald (1968). The Divine Twins: An Indo-European Myth in Germanic Tradition. University of California Press. It seems to be 30 pages long. :bloodofox: (talk) 02:16, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

Unfortunately the libraries over here don't have that book. As for the Latin there's nothing wrong with summarizing the account directly and Wikipedia has some good latinists. You could try posting some reasonably sized snippets on the language reference desk. Haukur (talk) 13:18, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

I see you two found back to the passages I mentioned earlier, that's great. I'm still a bit confused about Ocka Scharlensis. It seems like Suffridus was quoting Ocka Scharlensis, but mistaken in doing so, because no mention is made of Svana in Ocka Scharlensis' work. See Haigh, Daniel Henry (1861). The conquest of Britain by the Saxons (search Svana and Swane) and Lappenberg, Johann Martin (1845) translated by Benjamin Thorpe. A History of England Under the Anglo-Saxon Kings (search Svana) for the Ocka/Petrus stuff and some other things. Those two books are both from the 19th century, there is probably much more from more recent times. I can get books from a big library close to here, maybe they have something interesting. I'll be going to the city about a week, I might have time to stop by the library. Anyway, do any of you know anything else of Suffridus' sources? Be careful with calling Suffridus the primary source, though; these historians are not always to be trusted 100%.

Haigh also gives a good account of the topoyms on page 152:

Frisian tradition tells us of a sister of theirs named Swane; her name we find at Swanwick in Derbyshire, not far from Horsley; three Swantons (Swanetun )¹⁵ in Norfolk, a few miles to the west of the group of parishes which bear the name of Horsa; Swanborough near Horstead in Sussex; Swanthorpe, about a mile from Horsdon in Hampshire; Swanage on the coast of Dorsetshire, opposite to Hengistbury head; and Swanborough in Wiltshire.

¹⁵ The ancient forms of the names of these places determine the sex of their original possessor. The masculine name Swan formed the genitive Swanes; the feminine genitive was Swane, Thus Swanscombe bears the name of a man, Swanetun, and the rest in the text, that of a woman.

As you will find by looking a bit around in Haigh, he states a lot of toponyms for many central characters in the Anglo-Saxon geneaologies. –Holt (T•C) 01:22, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

Those horse head gables

This is pretty neat: Ašvieniai. I'll just reserve this section for other neat stuff and theories about the gables and similar. Feel free to post. –Holt (T•C) 01:36, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

That is indeed pretty neat. It's a shame that the article isn't better referenced; a can't preview any of the Google Book hits it pulls up. Nevertheless, it seems to fit the pattern perfectly. :bloodofox: (talk) 10:32, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

The image in that article is misleading because while the cottage is in Lithuania, it was actually built by the German writer Thomas Mann to be his holiday home. So the horse head gables aren't strictly the Lithuanian Ašvieniai, they're still German.Æscing (talk) 01:21, 27 December 2009 (UTC)

Good point. I've adjusted the image caption to better reflect this fact. :bloodofox: (talk) 02:51, 27 December 2009 (UTC)

An image of horse head gables was used as a logo at the beginning of at least one Nazi propaganda film: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeaIwnNj-QA Was it perhaps the logo of the Nazi Office of Racial Policy (Rassenpolitisches Amt der NSDAP)? Æscing (talk) 16:21, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

Modern influence section

I removed a couple of these items and was reverted. The items in that section seem to all be sourced to works that are not primarily about Hengist and Horsa; I think that without a secondary source about Hengist and Horsa that discusses modern depictions, a list of references to them in other sources is hard to distinguish from original research (if an argument is made for relevance) or from trivia (if no such argument is made). I'd support getting rid of the whole section, in fact, but since another editor disagrees let's see if anyone else comments. Mike Christie (talk) 18:41, 25 December 2009 (UTC)

Horsa or Hors?

I started a section where we could talk about the names, do you think it's important? The word Horsa is meaningless and Nennius refers to him as Hors. Also the names Hengest and Horsa seem to be anachronistic for the 5th century, because the Anglo-Saxons were still using the word eoh for a horse. It is the opinion of several scholars that if there was a pair of historical brothers, Hengest and Horsa were not their real names. Which only reinforces the notion that they have been conflated with a pair of divine horse-twins. Æscing (talk) 21:57, 26 December 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I think it's definitely important to bring out in detail here. I've turned the section you've created into an etymology section and brought some material out of the lead to help flesh it out a bit. :bloodofox: (talk) 02:51, 27 December 2009 (UTC)