Etymology
The name Rowena does not appear before Geoffrey's Historia, and neither it nor its cognates "Rowan" and "Rhonwen" were widely used given names before modern times, likely because Rowena was considered a negative character. Walter Scott used the name for the beautiful Saxon heroine of his novel Ivanhoe in 1819, the love interest of the title character, and by 1850 the name was in use in the United States.
Possible explanations for its meaning include a Latinized form of an Old English name meaning "fame and joy", formed from the words hroð (fame) and wynn (joy). Another suggestion is that it might have derived from the Welsh, where the name is "Rhonwen" (rhon + wen meaning "fair lance"), but this is possibly only a guess based on similarity of pronunciation.
Rowena and her story are not mentioned in old English sources such as Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum or the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The various differing spellings of Rowena's name make its origin unclear, and it may very well come from Welsh. The Welsh name Rhonwen means "Bright Spear"; alternately, the name might be related to rhawn (horsehair), which might be significant given her father and uncle's association with horses. The name itself was unrecorded before Geoffrey used it and he may have invented it.
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