Hengist and Horsa

Uncommon card · No. 105878

Hengist (, HENG-gist) and Horsa are legendary Germanic brothers, who according to later English legends, led the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, the progenitor groups of modern English people, in their invasion of Great Britain in the fifth century. Tradition lists Hengist as the first of the Jutish kings, or alternatively as the founder of the Kingdom of Kent. Modern scholarly consensus regards Hengist and Horsa as mythical figures, given their alliterative animal names, the seemingly constructed nature of their genealogy, and the unknowable quality of Bede's sources. Their later detailed representation in texts such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says more about 9th-century attitudes to the past than about the time in which they are said to have existed. According to early sources, Hengist and Horsa arrived in Britain at Ebbsfleet on the Isle of Thanet. For a time, they served as mercenaries for Vortigern, King of the Britons, but later they turned against him (British accounts have them betraying...

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