In lines 78-80a of the “Dream of the Rood”:
Nu ðu miht gehyran, hæleð min se leofa,
þæt ic bealuwara weorc gebiden hæbbe,
sarra sorga.
Roughly modernised, the Cross speaks:
Now you may hear, my dear warrior,
that I have endured the works of wicked men,
grevious sorrows.
Here, the neuter acc. weorc is roughly Mdn.E. “work”, and bealuwara1 has been translated variously as “miscreants”, “wicked men”. Bosworth Toller’s gives “baleful inhabitants”, “criminals”.2 But apparently this bit has caused philologists some trouble.3
As noted by Christopher Tolkien, one can compare also “Balrog”, which in Sindarin comes from BAL (“power”) + raug/rog (“demon”) but also seems to echo bealu-wearg (“outlaw”, “wolf”) or bealu-broga (“monster”, “terror”).4
- This is perhaps the pl. gen. of an unrecorded *bealuware, compounding bealu (“baleful”, “wicked”) and ware (“inhabitant”).
- Joseph Bosworth, ‘Bealu-Ware’, in An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online, ed. Thomas Northcote Toller, Christ Sean, and Ondřej Tichy, London: Oxford University Press; Prague: Faculty of Arts, Charles University, 2014. q.v.
- G. C. Britton, ‘“Bealuwara Weorc” in the “Dream of the Rood”’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 68, no. 3 (1967): 273–76, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43342353. q.v.
- J. R. R. Tolkien and Christopher Tolkien, The Shaping of Middle-earth: The Quenta, the Ambarkanta, and the Annals, Together with the Earliest ’Silmarillion’ and the First Map (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986). q.v.