Gavin Douglas's Latin Vocabulary

Abstract

ALMOST SINCE IT WAS FIRST WRITTEN (in 1512-13) and first printed (in 1553) Gavin Douglas's version of the Aeneid in Scottis verse has been both extravagantly praised' and severely criticized.2 In spite of this interest among critics, however, the whole poem has only been printed five times (1553, 1710, 1839, 1874, and in the 1950's by the Scottish Text Society) and none of these editions is now in print. The reason for this neglect undoubtedly lies in the peculiarities of his vocabulary, a strange mixture of Scots dialect, Chaucerian English, and French and Latin derivatives no longer in use, compounded by archaic spellings and letters and grammar. But to those who take the trouble to master this language there are rich rewards in new and more vivid insights into Virgil's meaning. In my view it remains, all in all, the best, as it was the first, translation of Aeneid into our language. In all the criticism of Douglas's work there has been no comprehensive study of its accuracy as a translation of Virgil. As a first step to remedy such a lack this paper will deal only with Douglas's knowledge of Latin words; it will not touch on how well or ill he captures the spirit and passions of the original, with his verbosity as a contrast to Virgil's tightly packed sentences, or with his lack of appreciation of the metrical effects of the Latin. It is, of course, only one and a relatively minor aspect of accuracy to analyse individual words, but this is of some interest also as reflecting the standards of verbal accuracy possible in the early sixteenth century and the occasional difficulties that even well-educated scholars faced.