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Hengist and Horsa arrived in Kent as mercenaries at the invitation of the British King Vortigern (though here history and myth elide) and became the first English kings - I am astonished that many English people do not know this
Even the least educated Romanian knows about the earliest Dacian kings, Burebista and Decebal, but an English friend who took a First at Cambridge in Modern History asked me who they were. Which shows you Romanian National Communist schools taught pupils better than English pupils who care nothing for their (key word) medieval history.
Are Hengist and Horsa really better attested than, say, Lycurgus? My recollection from a class on Anglo-Saxon is that the names translated as Stud and Mare.
ReplyDeleteNobody knows whether those were the names of the invading Jutish kings. Samuel Butler said that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not written by Homer but by someone else of the same name.
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