Short answers, pulled from the story.
Hilda Ellis Davidson was an English folklorist born on the 1st of October 1914 in Bebington, Cheshire, who died on the 12th of January 2006. She specialized in the interdisciplinary study of Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, and Old Norse religion and folklore, combining archaeological, literary, and philological evidence. She was a Fellow at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, and a prominent member of The Folklore Society.
Her first book, The Road to Hel: A Study of the Conception of the Dead in Old Norse Literature, was published in 1943 under her maiden name Hilda Ellis. It used archaeological evidence to examine how death was understood in Norse paganism, an interdisciplinary approach that was unusual in British academia at the time.
Davidson received a research award from the Leverhulme Trust in 1964 for her work in the Soviet Union, and the Coote Lake Medal for Folklore Research in 1984. In 1988 she received the Katharine Briggs Folklore Award for her book Myths and Symbols in Pagan Europe, an award she had helped endow in 1982.
Davidson joined The Folklore Society in 1949 and served on its council from 1956 to 1986. She was President of the Society from 1974 to 1976, during which the Society's constitution was rewritten and the journal Folklore expanded. She also supervised the Mistletoe Books series, organized conferences, and edited conference papers.
Davidson studied at Newnham College, Cambridge, earning a First Class Honours degree in English, archaeology, and anthropology. She received both her M.A. in 1939 and her PhD in 1940 from Newnham, with her doctoral thesis focused on Old Norse religion.
Davidson became proficient in Old Norse, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Icelandic, Russian, Latin, and German. This broad linguistic range allowed her to work directly with sources across the Norse, Germanic, and Celtic traditions she studied throughout her career.