Legendary ancestors of Cerdic of Wessex

A number of royal genealogies of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, collectively referred to as the Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies, have been preserved in a manuscript tradition based in the 8th to 10th centuries.

The genealogies trace the succession of the early Anglo-Saxon kings, back to the semi-legendary kings of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, notably named as Hengest and Horsa in Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, and further to legendary kings and heroes of the pre-migration period, usually including an eponymous ancestor of the respecitve lineage and converging on Woden. In their fully elaborated forms as preserved in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles and the Textus Roffensis, they continue the pedigrees back to the biblical patriarchs Noah and Adam. They also served as the basis for pedigrees that would be developed in 13th century Iceland for the Scandinavian royalty.

The Anglo-Saxons, uniquely among the early Germanic peoples, preserved royal genealogies. The earliest source for these genealogies is Bede, who in his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (completed in or before 731) said of the founders of the Kingdom of Kent:

The two first commanders are said to have been Hengest and Horsa ... They were the sons of Victgilsus, whose father was Vecta, son of Woden; from whose stock the royal race of many provinces deduce their original.

...
Wikipedia