The article examines the ways to transfer the meanings of the verb mōtan in V. Tikhomirov’s translation of the “Beowulf” epic poem. The study focuses on the techniques and methods used to express specific semantic meanings “permission” and “inevitable necessity” conditioned by historical relation of the word mōtan semantics with the concepts Destiny and God. The translation fragments are considered with a view to analyse applied translation techniques and to identify the level of the adequacy of the represented meanings in relation to the contextual pragmatics of statements in the analysed original text fragments.