Battered naggin
Battered
naggin
In Brief
In response to the question "Where you slep las nigh?," one
of the crew heading for Burke's pub at the end of Oxen of
the Sun says, "Timothy of the battered naggin." The
phrase refers to Sir Timothy O'Brien, an early 19th century
innkeeper whose establishment was in the Liberties near St.
Patrick's cathedral. He supposedly acquired the nickname The
Knight of the Battered Naggin by serving drinks in battered
metal cups that enabled him to deprive customers of their full
measure.
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In a paper delivered in April 1893 to the Irish National Literary Society, one Patrick Joseph McCall discussed a private house near St. Patrick's that became public in the 18th century. In the early 1800s it was owned by a minor nobleman called Sir Timothy O'Brien. "The worthy baronet," McCall says, "appears to have been an eccentric character in his way, and among a certain class of his customers (before he resigned his retail for a wholesale store) he was invariably known as 'The Knight of the Battered Naggin,' recalling Cervantes' Knight of the Golden Basin in Don Quixote. This cognomen of Sir Tim had reference to the dilapidated conditions of his pewter measures by means of which, his customers asserted, the niggard landlord saved a goodly amount of the precious liquor" (quoted from a reprinting of McCall's paper in the 1976 book In the Shadow of St. Patrick's, p. 26).
The word naggin,
in 1904, could denote an Irish drinking cup, traditionally
made of tiny wood staves, or a certain liquid measure. Both
senses are relevant in this case, because Sir Tim's naggins
were pewter rather than wood and their dented sides reduced
the amount of liquid they could hold. Fritz Senn, who
(following an observation offered by Dubliner Gerald
O'Flaherty) first cited McCall's paper as relevant to Ulysses
in "Trivia Ulysseana IV," JJQ 19.2 (1982): 151-78,
speculates that The Knight of the Battered Naggin "became
locally proverbial for any miserly landlord" (172). The man
who recalls the expression in Oxen of the Sun may be
jokingly referring to some ungenerous establishment where he
is currently sleeping, or perhaps he is jokingly playing along
with the fancy of being a "Bonafide." St. Patrick's
cathedral is not three miles away from Holles Street, but it
is fairly far.
