Eneados

The Eneados is a translation into Middle Scots of the Latin Virgil's Aeneid, completed by the poet and clergyman Gavin Douglas in 1513.

The title of Gavin Douglas' translation "Eneados" is given in the heading of a manuscript at Cambridge University, which refers to the "twelf bukis of Eneados." The title of the first printed edition London (1553) was The xiii Bukes of Eneados of the famose Poete Virgill.

The work was the first complete translation of any major work of classical antiquity into an English or Anglic language. In addition to Douglas's version of Virgil's Aeneid, the work also contains a translation of the "thirteenth book" written by the fifteenth-century poet Maffeo Vegio as a continuation of the Aeneid. Douglas supplied original prologue verses for each of the thirteen books, and a series of concluding poems. There is also an incomplete commentary, covering only part of the first book, written as marginal notes (almost certainly in Douglas's own hand) in the Cambridge manuscript.

In the first general prologue Douglas compares the merits of Virgil and Chaucer as master poets and attacks the printer William Caxton for his inadequate rendering of a French translation of the Aeneid.

It contains the first recorded use of ‘wow’ in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Douglas's reputation among modern readers was bolstered somewhat in 1934 when Ezra Pound included several passages of his Eneados in his ABC of Reading. Comparing Douglas to Chaucer, Pound wrote that "the texture of Gavin's verse is stronger, the resilience greater than Chaucer's".C. S. Lewis was also an admirer of the work: "About Douglas as a translator there may be two opinions; about his Aeneid (Prologues and all) as an English book there can be only one. Here a great story is greatly told and set off with original embellishments which are all good—all either delightful or interesting—in their diverse ways."

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