The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records, in exhausting and imaginative detail, the descent of King Alfred's father through Woden, Noah, Enoch and Adam. The genealogy, stretching back some forty generations, preserves the paternal descent of West Saxon kings from the age of Germanic settlement in England to 855. Like other royal genealogies of the period, however, the list is wanting in a number of ways. Old English kings' descent through Germanic gods, equine brothers and Hebrew patriarchs is hardly credible. The names of these rulers' mortal ancestors in the epoch before the Anglo-Saxon invasions are based on fancy rather than fact, and the inclusion of some of their descendants in the historic period were determined by political ideology and convention rather than blood. And because royal genealogies interest themselves only in that neat succession of one king to the next, they do not preserve the names of maternal kindred nor do they record non-ruling siblings and offspring. As haphazard and as difficult as the material in this and other royal genealogies may be, it provides more information about the West Saxon kings' factual and fictive kin that exists in toto for any of the great Anglo-Saxon aristocrats from Hengest and Horsa to Harold Godwineson. Evidence for the complex collateral kindreds of the Saxon Age is extremely fragmentary and must be pieced together from the occasional family relationship noted in the attestation lists of royal charters or mentioned in the bequests and obits of pre-Conquest England.