Another interesting thing came up during our BW translation group, which I wanted to discuss briefly. When Wealhtheow enters the hall to pass the ale-horn around, she goes first to Hrothgar and then to the assembled warriors before reaching Beowulf:

Ymbeode þa   ides Helminga
duguþe ond geogoþe   dæl æghwylcne,
sincfato sealde… (ll. 620-22a)

What is unusual about these lines arises in the glossary to Klaeber 4, where the editors state that the rhyming doublet “duguþe ond geogoþe” are in the genitive singular case, an identification that goes way back to the Bosworth-Toller dictionary (though probably it originates even earlier). For the entry for “duguþ”, Bosworth cites this line and then translates it as “Then the Helmings’ dame went round every part [group] of old and young.” The parsing of these words as genitive singular is maintained by Klaeber and Mitchell & Robinson, and achieves its necessity doubtlessly from the presence of “dæl” in the same line, a word which often requires a partitive genitive to reach its full sense. In neither case is the unusual grammatical form marked by a note or explanation.

However, the words “duguþe ond geogoþe” are identical to the much more commonly found dative singular forms, such as in Andreas line 152 or BW 160. And it is as dative singulars that many translators have tended to read the line, as in Liuzza: “The lady of the Helmings then went about / to young and old, gave each his portion / of the precious cup” (p. 68, reading the accusative plural sincfato as a genitive singular), or in Chickering: “The lady of the Helmings walked through the hall, / offered the jeweled cup to veterans and youths” (p/ 85). (The more traditionally-inflected Bradley, on p. 428, uses the genitive singular forms in his translation of the passage).

The point of this post is to suggest that the most common & more easily recognizable dative singular forms of “duguþe ond geogoþe” are already commonly accepted as a reading more readily construed in modern English, and that a reading can be made that accommodates the “dæl æghwylcne” without resorting to partitive genitives. My own translation at this point reads as such:

Then the lady of the Helmings rounded throughout,
giving jeweled cups to young and old,
on every side… (Hostetter, ll. 620-22a)

Here “dæl æghwylcne” (here, “on every side”) is read as a spatial accusative, freeing it from the doublet of “duguþe ond geogoþe” and allowing them to be read in their more comfortable dative singular form.