Fantasy genealogy

Fantasy genealogies are mythical, fictional or fabricated pedigrees, usually to enhance the status of the descendant.

Many claimed ancestries are considered by modern scholars to be fabrications, especially the claims of kings and emperors who trace their ancestry to gods or the founders of their civilization. Such pedigrees also have a moral message to their subjects, allies and enemies. Some national epics or holy scriptures associate success, blessing and good with the "rightful dynasty" and wars, catastrophes and diseases with usurper rulers. In this moralism, fictional genealogies have analogies with allegory, fable and parable.

For example, chroniclers of Germanic peoples traced the ancestry of their kings back to the god Wotan (Woden, Odin). If such descents were true, Queen Elizabeth II would be a descendant of Woden, via the kings of Wessex.

Japanese imperial dynasty is mythically descended from Amaterasu Omikami, sun goddess.

See also

• euhemerism