Short answers, pulled from the story.
Georges Dumézil's trifunctional hypothesis holds that ancient Indo-European societies were organized around three functions: priests who maintained cosmic and juridical sovereignty, warriors who exercised physical prowess, and commoners who promoted fertility, wealth, and physical well-being. He argued these three functions were reflected in the mythologies of Norse, Vedic, and Roman traditions, among others.
Georges Dumézil was born in Paris, France, on the 4th of March 1898, and died in Paris on the 11th of October 1986 from a massive stroke. He was the son of a highly educated French Army general.
Georges Dumézil became proficient in more than forty languages over his lifetime, including all branches of the Indo-European family, most languages of the Caucasus such as Ossetian and Armenian, and indigenous languages of the Americas including Quechuan. He is credited with saving the Ubykh language from extinction.
Dumézil supported the far-right royalist movement Action Française in the 1930s but never formally joined it. He opposed Nazism, joined the pro-Jewish Masonic lodge Grande Loge de France, and was fired from his academic post by the Vichy government in 1941 as a result of his Freemasonry. Accusations that he was a crypto-Fascist were mounted by historians Arnaldo Momigliano and Carlo Ginzburg, but Didier Eribon's 1992 book Faut-il brûler Dumézil? is credited with permanently refuting those charges.
Dumézil's magnum opus was Mythe et épopée, published in three volumes between 1968 and 1973. It provides a thorough overview of the trifunctional ideology across Indo-European mythology and earned him the Prix Paul Valery in 1974.
Dumézil held professorships at Istanbul University, the École pratique des hautes études, and the Collège de France, where he was Chair of Indo-European Civilization in a position created specifically for him. He was elected to the Académie Française in 1975, received honorary doctorates from the universities of Uppsala, Istanbul, Berne, and Liège, and was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca in 1984.