Short answers, pulled from the story.
John Lindow is an American philologist and Professor Emeritus of Old Norse and Folklore at the University of California, Berkeley. He is recognized as a leading authority on Old Norse religion and literature, as well as Scandinavian folklore, Sami and Finnish mythology, and Inuit religion.
John Lindow studied at Harvard University, where he earned an A.B. magna cum laude in Germanic Languages and Literatures in 1968 and a PhD in the same field in 1972.
In 2018, John Lindow received the Knight's Cross of the Order of the Falcon at the Icelandic president's residence, in recognition of his scholarly contributions to Icelandic medieval literature.
John Lindow's Handbook of Norse Mythology was published in 2001 and also issued by Oxford University Press as Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs. It is one of his most widely cited reference works on Scandinavian mythology.
John Lindow's major publications include Swedish Legends and Folktales (1978), a co-edited critical guide to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature (1985), Murder Vengeance among the Gods on the figure of Baldr (1997), Trolls: An Unnatural History (2014), and Old Norse Mythology published by Oxford University Press in 2021.
John Lindow has been a corresponding member of the Royal Gustavus Adolphus Academy since 1977, a member of the American Folklore Society, the Medieval Academy of America, and the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study. In 2013 he was a Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala, Sweden.