Curated playlist
Old Norse 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- Rasmus B. AndersonRasmus Bjørn Anderson was born on the 12th of January 1846 in the Town of Albion, Dane County, Wisconsin, to Norwegian immigrant parents who had crossed the Atlantic as part of a small band of Quaker sympathizers. His father died of…
- 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…
- Kevin Crossley-HollandKevin Crossley-Holland has translated a passage from Beowulf in which Grendel storms out of the mist toward the mead hall: "Then, under night's shroud, Grendel walked down from the moors. He shouldered God's anger. The evil plunderer…
- 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…