Åke Ohlmarks

• 1. Introduction

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  Åke 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 in his world, just to prevent further damage. That translator was Ohlmarks: a Swedish philologist, popular historian, and restless scholar born in Kristianstad on the 3rd of June 1911. He published around eighty works of popular science and history across his lifetime, plus roughly as many translations, nine novels, and four volumes of autobiography. Behind that staggering output was a man who kept reinventing himself, from student poet to Nazi-era academic to film industry executive to conspiracy theorist. What drove a legitimate scholar to antagonise the most devoted fandom in the world? And what does a 1982 book connecting Tolkien with Nazi occultism tell us about the man who wrote it?

• 2. The Scholar in Formation

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  Lund University shaped Ohlmarks in ways that would trail him his entire life. He studied Nordic languages and the history of religion there, and threw himself into student culture, earning a reputation for occasional poetry and Spex writing, a form of satirical theatrical revue. After completing a bachelor's degree, he edited a student newspaper. He lectured in Tübingen from 1933 to 1934, then in Reykjavík from 1935 to 1936. He earned a Licentiate of Philosophy in 1935 and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1937. His doctoral thesis, Heimdalls Horn und Odins Auge, was a study in Nordic and comparative religion, but it was criticised for lacking philological accuracy. When he failed to secure a Swedish readership, which would have opened a path to a permanent academic position, Ohlmarks had an explanation ready: his satirical poetry had made enemies of his professors. That claim tells you something about how he understood the world. Personal slights and hidden antagonisms, rather than intellectual shortcomings, explained his setbacks. It was a habit of mind that would surface again, decades later, in very different circumstances. His first major piece of serious scholarship appeared in 1939, when he published a study in Lund titled Studien zum Problem des Schamanismus, examining the problem of shamanism in Nordic and comparative religion.

• 3. Greifswald and the War Years

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  From 1941 to 1945, Ohlmarks held a position as docent and associate professor in the Swedish language at the University of Greifswald. He did not arrive as a passive presence. He founded an institute for religious studies there, leading it alongside a member of the Deutsche Christen, the German Christian movement that sought to align Protestantism with National Socialist ideology. Ohlmarks himself did not reshape his scholarship to fit Nazi doctrine, and he later denied being a Nazi. His conduct during those years has been described by others as opportunistic: a mixture of adaptation, collaboration, and ignorance, rather than ideological commitment. He left Greifswald shortly before the Red Army entered the city, one of millions of personal decisions made at the collapse of the Third Reich that would later require careful narration. He published four academic papers during those years, including a 1943 piece on the classical Icelandic sagas and their concept of honour, which appeared in a volume edited by Walter Grundmann, a leading Deutsche Christen theologian. His own later memoir of the period, After Me the Deluge: Greifswald-Berlin-Hamburg 1941-1945, published in 1980, offered his account of those years.

• 4. Prolific and Financially Pressured

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  After the war, Ohlmarks moved into the Swedish film industry. From 1950 to 1959, he directed the manuscript department at Europafilm. It was a significant institutional role, but whatever financial stability it provided did not last. When he left Europafilm, money became a persistent pressure, and the source of that pressure fed directly into the size of his bibliography. The roughly eighty popular science and history works he produced, alongside roughly as many translations, were at least partly a product of financial need rather than purely scholarly drive. He held a visiting professorship in Zürich in 1965 and became head of the Institut für vergleichende Felsbildforschung in Rheinklingen in 1966. He also contributed to the Zürich newspaper Die Tat from 1966. His translations spanned an extraordinary range: the Icelandic Edda, works by Shakespeare, Dante, and Nostradamus, a version of the Qur'an, and books by writers he found compelling enough to render into Swedish. He held a deep interest in Iranian studies, writing Alla Irans härskare and a volume titled Shiʾa: iranska islams urkunder, the latter a criticism of Islamic fundamentalism. The sheer range suggests a mind that could not settle, or a career structured around whatever commission came next.

• 5. Tolkien's Nemesis

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  Tolkien himself was provoked enough to respond in writing. Ohlmarks's Swedish translation of The Lord of the Rings displeased the author so deeply that Tolkien compiled his "Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings" specifically because of what Ohlmarks had done to the text. The grievances were concrete: Ohlmarks invented his own expressions, shortened significant portions of the work, and inserted his own interpretations into the narrative. Tolkien also objected to the title Ohlmarks chose, Sagan om ringen, which translates as The Saga of the Ring, a framing Tolkien did not accept. Swedish Tolkien readers and the Tolkien fandom joined Tolkien in criticising the translation. That criticism was sustained and public. By the late 1970s, the response Ohlmarks chose was not revision or apology but hostility toward what he called the "Tolkien phenomenon" as a whole. In 1982, he published Tolkien and Black Magic, a book that laid out a conspiracy theory connecting Tolkien and Tolkien fandom with Nazi occultism. It is a striking destination for a man who had spent decades near the orbit of actual Nazi-era institutions. Despite everything, his translations remained the only Swedish-language versions of The Lord of the Rings until 2005, when Erik Andersson and Lotta Olsson published a completely new one.

• 6. The Life Behind the Work

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  Ohlmarks was born the son of a wholesaler named Joel Ohlmarks and Anna-Lisa Larsson. He married at least three times. His second marriage, in 1954, was to Letty Steenstrup, born in 1919, the daughter of Erling Steenstrup and Ruth Strandnaes. His third marriage, in 1969, was to Monica Suter, born in 1940, daughter of Adolf Suter von Schwyz, who worked as an editorial assistant. He had been chairman of the Association of Nordic Philologists in Lund from 1931 to 1934 and chaired the Academic Society for the Swedish-Baltic Cooperation from 1938 to 1940. He served as secretary of the Science of Religion Community in Lund from 1936. The autobiography volumes he produced, including I paradiset from 1965 and Doktor i Lund from 1980, suggest a man who spent considerable effort shaping how posterity would read him. He died on the 6th of June 1984 in Crist di Niardo, in the province of Brescia, Italy. Three days after his seventy-third birthday, in a small Italian locality far from Kristianstad, the career that had ricocheted from Lund to Reykjavík, Tübingen, Greifswald, Zürich, and Stockholm came to its end.