Curated playlist
Germanic studies scholars
- François-Xavier DillmannFrançois-Xavier Dillmann was born on the 27th of November 1949, and he has spent his career doing something very few scholars attempt: mastering the language, religion, and runic inscriptions of medieval Scandinavia from a distinctly…
- Lotte MotzLotte Motz was born on the 16th of August 1922, in Austria, and she spent the better part of four decades quietly transforming how scholars think about Norse gods, giants, dwarfs, and goddesses. She published four books and dozens of…
- John LindowJohn Frederick Lindow was born in Washington, D.C., on the 23rd of July 1946, the son of a banker and a schoolteacher. He would go on to spend decades at the University of California, Berkeley, building one of the most comprehensive…
- Joan Turville-PetreJoan Elizabeth Turville-Petre entered the world on the 10th of May 1911. Her parents were Sam Blomfield and Kate Barton from Colchester in Essex. This English philologist would later specialize in Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse studies at…
- Wilhelm MannhardtWilhelm Mannhardt was born on the 26th of March 1831 in Friedrichstadt, a small town in what is now northern Germany. He died on the 25th of December 1880, having spent his final years not in a university hall but behind the counter of a…
- Jacob GrimmJacob Ludwig Karl Grimm was born on the 4th of January 1785, in Hanau in Hesse-Kassel, and he spent nearly eight decades building what may be the most wide-ranging scholarly legacy in the history of the German language. His father Philipp,…
- Hilda Ellis DavidsonHilda Ellis Davidson was born in Bebington, Cheshire, on the 1st of October 1914, and by the time she died in January 2006, she had spent more than six decades reshaping how the English-speaking world understood the myths and beliefs of…
- Rudolf SimekRudolf Simek was born on the 21st of February 1954 in Austria, and he would spend the decades that followed mapping the mythological landscape of the medieval Germanic world with a scholar's patience and a writer's range. His books have…
- Gabriel Turville-PetreGabriel Turville-Petre entered the world at Bosworth Hall in Husbands Bosworth, Leicestershire on the 25th of March 1908. He was the youngest of five children born to Lieutenant-Colonel Oswald Henry Philip Turville-Petre and Margaret Lucy…
- Georges DumézilGeorges Dumézil was born in Paris on the 4th of March 1898, the son of a highly educated general in the French Army. By the time he died in the same city on the 11th of October 1986, he had published more than seventy-five books, mastered…
- Peter Andreas MunchPeter Andreas Munch was born in Christiania on the 15th of December 1810, and by the time he died in Rome on the 25th of May 1863, he had reshaped how Norway understood its own past. He trained as a lawyer, then abandoned that path…
- Viktor RydbergAbraham Viktor Rydberg entered the world on the 18th of December 1828 in Gothenburg, Sweden. His father Johan worked as a soldier before becoming a prison guard. His mother Hedvig Düker practiced midwifery. They raised two sons and three…
- Åke OhlmarksÅke Ohlmarks is remembered today mainly because a famous author despised what he did to his book. J. R. R. Tolkien was so troubled by the Swedish translation of The Lord of the Rings that he sat down and wrote a detailed guide to the names…