Rowena English pronunciation: /roʊˈiːnə/ in the Matter of Britain was the daughter of the mythological Anglo-Saxon chief Hengist and wife of Vortigern, "King of the Britons". Presented as a beautiful femme fatale, she won her people the Kingdom of Kent through her treacherous seduction of Vortigern. Contemporary sources do not mention Rowena, which leads modern historians to regard her as fictitious.
The name "Rowena" does not appear in Old English sources such as Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. It was first recorded by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his 12th-century Historia Regum Britanniae (in various spellings, including Ronwen, Renwein, and Romwenna), and may represent a Medieval Latin corruption of some lost Old English or other Germanic name.
Another possibility is that it comes from the Brittonic languages, where the name becomes Welsh Rhonwen; this could be connected to the word "horsehair" (Welsh: rhawn), which might be significant given her father and uncle's association with horses, but this is simply conjecture based on similarity of pronunciation.