Gabriel Turville-Petre

• 1. Introduction

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  In August 1942, the Foreign Office sent Gabriel Turville-Petre to the Faroe Islands for two months. The stated purpose was "in order to study the inhabitants, their politics and conditions of life."

  Edward Oswald Gabriel Turville-Petre was born on the 25th of March 1908 at Bosworth Hall in Leicestershire, the home of a prominent Catholic family. He became an English philologist, a scholar of languages and the old texts written in them, and he specialized in Old Norse studies. He was a leading member of the Viking Society for Northern Research, and his books on Old Norse literature and religion are still influential today.

  How did a boy from a Leicestershire Catholic household become a leading authority on medieval Iceland? What did he argue about when the sagas were written, about the stories of the old gods, and about where the poetry of the skalds came from? The answers begin in his childhood and run through a long career.

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• 2. Leicestershire to Iceland

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  Gabriel was the youngest of five children. His parents were Lieutenant-Colonel Oswald Henry Philip Turville-Petre (1862-1941) and Margaret Lucy Cave (1875-1954). The family belonged to the Catholic landed gentry of England, and in 1912-13 his father served as sheriff of Leicestershire. His elder brother Francis became an archaeologist. Gabriel received a traditional Catholic upbringing. Even as a child, he developed a strong interest in Iceland and its people, and it stayed with him for life.

  At Ampleforth College he received his schooling, and in 1926 he entered Christ Church, Oxford. He took a Third in 1930, then studied for a B.Litt in English from 1931 to 1934 under J. R. R. Tolkien, graduating in 1936. Charles Leslie Wrenn influenced him strongly, as he did Alan S. C. Ross. The first of his many visits to Iceland came in 1931, while he was still an undergraduate.

  On remote farms in the north and east of Iceland, he spent much of his time there, and the traditional way of life of the Icelanders fascinated him. Journeys to Scandinavia and Germany brought friendships with many influential scholars of Old Norse. Þórbergur Þórðarson was among his most important teachers. Over his career he returned often to Scandinavia, especially to Uppsala and Odense.

  Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Swedish and German all became fluent languages for him, and he was also proficient in French. He added Irish and Welsh during his studies, which opened Celtic literature to him. Latin, Old English and Gothic followed eventually. Frequent trips to Wales let him study Celtic material, and that knowledge would prove indispensable for his later research on Norse mythology.

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• 3. Societies and War

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  In 1935, Turville-Petre became Honorary Lecturer in Modern Icelandic at the University of Leeds, a post he held until 1950. That same year he joined the Viking Society for Northern Research, and in 1936 he was elected to its Council. For the rest of his life he stayed close to the Society, publishing papers, reviews, translations and editions for it.

  From 1936 to 1938, Turville-Petre was Lektor in English at the University of Iceland, and he also served as British pro-consul in Reykjavík. For a time he lectured at the University of Turku as well. In 1939 he became Joint Honorary Secretary and Joint Editor of the Saga-Book, the Society's publication. He resigned as editor in 1963 but remained Joint Honorary Secretary until his death.

  His graduate work on the Víga-Glúms saga appeared in 1940 as the first title in the Oxford English Monographs series. Björn M. Ólsen and Sigurður Nordal influenced its approach. By then he had published several influential papers on Old Norse literature and religion, and he was already a major authority in both fields.

  Oxford appointed him the first Vigfússon Reader in Ancient Icelandic Literature and Antiquities in 1941. At the time he was working as a cryptanalyst at Bletchley Park. He spent much of World War II in the Foreign Office. Not until 1946 could he finally take up the Oxford position.

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• 4. Dating the Sagas

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  Charles Leslie Wrenn became Turville-Petre's opponent in 1941-42, in a dispute over the date when the sagas of Icelanders were composed. In 1942, Turville-Petre published Notes on the intellectual history of Icelanders. It summarized early Icelandic literary history so well that it is still considered authoritative. He argued that the sagas were composed from the 13th century, and that view has since become generally accepted.

  Apart from the quarrel with Wrenn, he was not involved in many scholarly controversies. He had little patience for charlatans, yet he was known for tolerance and kindness toward amateurs who genuinely wanted to learn. He never derided students or fellow scholars for their shortcomings. He did insist that his students commit themselves to scholarship as rigorously as he did.

  Also in 1942, he and Elizabeth Stefanyja Olszewska (1906-1973), the wife of Alan S. C. Ross, published a translation of Guðmundar saga biskups. His introduction shows a clear admiration for Páll Jónsson, a contemporary of Guðmundur Arason.

  In 1951 came The Heroic Age of Scandinavia, an account of the legends and history of Scandinavia in the Migration Period and the Viking Age. Many Scandinavian scholars disagreed with him, but he held that Icelandic literature offered much useful information on the early history and culture of Scandinavia. He would return to Icelandic literature on a larger scale in 1953.

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• 5. The Magnum Opus

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  Origins of Icelandic Literature appeared in 1953, with a revised second edition in 1967. It is considered his magnum opus and his most influential work. The book gives a detailed account of the settlement and early history of Iceland.

  Its boldest claim is that the Icelanders produced "the richest and most varied" literature of medieval Europe. He suggested that Icelandic writers both preserved older Scandinavian oral traditions and developed newer ones. He also proposed that Celtic settlers in Iceland shaped the distinctive character of the literature, especially its poetry, and he pointed to Old English and Irish influences as well.

  Around the year 1000, Iceland converted to Christianity. Turville-Petre proposed that the Icelanders were an uprooted people who had left their Scandinavian homelands. That, he thought, made the conversion easier and more peaceful. It may also explain why Christian Icelanders were relatively tolerant of pagans in the years afterward.

  Sæmundr Sigfússon and Ari Thorgilsson are among the early Icelandic writers the book discusses. Turville-Petre believed that Ari was an important source for the later Landnámabók. The book also treats the Kings' sagas at length, which he saw as the product of both earlier Scandinavian traditions and more recent Christian influences. He believed that Egil's Saga had been written by Snorri Sturluson. Snorri would matter again in his writing on Norse religion.

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• 6. Gods and Snorri

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  Since the early 1930s, Turville-Petre had published influential papers on Old Norse religion, particularly on deities such as Odin and Freyr. One early example was "The Cult of Freyr in the Evening of Paganism," printed in 1935. By the 1950s, some scholars had made it fashionable to dismiss Snorri Sturluson's writings on Norse mythology as literary inventions with no roots in older traditions. Turville-Petre disagreed and believed that Snorri had drawn on genuine material.

  That conviction drew him to the French philologist Georges Dumézil, known for comparative studies of Indo-European mythology and for the trifunctional hypothesis. Dumézil had published numerous monographs on the Indo-European components of Germanic mythology, and they greatly impressed Turville-Petre. Between 1953 and 1955, he reviewed three of them sympathetically in the Saga-Book. In 1956 he invited Dumézil to lecture at Oxford. In 1960 he wrote the article "Professor Dumézil and the literature of Iceland" for Hommages á Georges Dumézil.

  Myth and Religion of the North appeared in 1964 from Weidenfeld & Nicolson, as part of their History of Religion series. It has been described as his most ambitious and substantial work. The book gives a comprehensive overview of Old Norse religion and draws on Norse, Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, Baltic and Germanic material. Like Dumézil, Turville-Petre was considered an expert on Germanic antiquity.

  Jan de Vries issued a second edition of Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte in 1956-57 that fully adopted Dumézil's theories, including the trifunctional hypothesis. Turville-Petre's book took a different course and did not accept all of them. He held that Old Norse religion preserved many archaic features from Indo-European and Germanic sources. He also saw late and local features, some perhaps shaped by Christian influence. Many scholars still consider his book the best work on Old Norse religion in English.

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• 7. Honours and Skalds

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  In 1953, Oxford appointed Turville-Petre to a professorship, which he held until 1975. The same year he became General Editor of the Viking Society's text and monographs series. In 1956, the Society named him one of its twelve Honorary Life Members. That year he and Christopher Tolkien also published Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks, a translation with commentary on a saga considered one of the most archaic and interesting of the Icelandic legendary sagas. With Sigurður Nordal, he was General Editor of the Icelandic Texts, a four-volume collection of saga texts and translations published by Nelson between 1959 and 1965.

  The President of Iceland gave him the Knight's Cross of the Order of the Falcon in 1956. In 1963 came the even more prestigious Grand Knight's Cross. Honorary doctorates followed from the University of Iceland in 1961 and Uppsala University in 1977. He belonged to many Icelandic and Scandinavian learned societies, including the Icelandic Literary Society (1948), the Royal Gustavus Adolphus Academy (1960) and the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences in Gothenburg (1976).

  In 1964, Christ Church elected him to a studentship. With Edgar C. Polomé, he wrote the article on Germanic religion and mythology for the 15th edition of Britannica. In 1965 he was visiting professor at the University of Melbourne, where he contributed significantly to the growth of Icelandic studies in Australia. His friend Ian Maxwell strongly encouraged these trips, and Turville-Petre visited Australia three more times. He predicted that Australia would eventually lead the English-speaking world in Icelandic studies.

  His later career centered on Old Norse poetry. He was especially interested in the origins of the dróttkvætt, a skaldic verse form, which he believed came from Celtic, particularly Irish, influences. In 1954 he had published a celebrated paper on the subject in Icelandic, later translated into English as On the poetry of the scalds and of the filid. He saw clear parallels between the Norse skalds and the Irish filí. Scaldic Poetry followed in 1976, giving special attention to early Icelandic poets such as Egill Skallagrímsson and Þjóðólfr of Hvinir.

  In 1972, the Viking Society presented him with Nine Norse Studies, a selection of papers he wrote between 1940 and 1962. It included his 1944 essay on Gísli Súrsson, revised for the volume. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1973. In 1975 he retired from Oxford as Professor Emeritus, and Ursula Dronke succeeded him as Vigfússon Reader. From 1975 to 1978 he was a Research Fellow at University College London. In 1976, the Society established the annual Turville-Petre Prize for an Oxford student's distinguished scholarship in "Northern Research".

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• 8. Legacy and Home

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  Turville-Petre died of cancer in Oxford on the 17th of February 1978. He left his personal library to the English Faculty Library of Oxford University, where it forms part of the Icelandic Collections. The room at Oxford that houses the university's books on Old Norse and Icelandic carries his name.

  Speculum Norroenum, a festschrift in his honor, appeared in 1981. Ursula Dronke edited it, and the University Press of Southern Denmark published it after his death. It included an affectionate memoir by his Icelandic friend Einar Ólafur Sveinsson, some of whose works Turville-Petre had translated into English.

  At Oxford, he supervised students from all over the world who later held prominent academic posts in many countries. He was highly regarded as a teacher and supervisor, and generations of scholars in his fields owed their training to him.

  On the 7th of January 1943, he married Joan Elizabeth Blomfield, a distinguished scholar of Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse studies at Oxford. They had three sons. Thorlac Francis Samuel was born on the 6th of January 1944, Merlin Oswald on the 2nd of July 1946, and Brendan Arthur Auberon on the 16th of September 1948. Outside scholarship, Turville-Petre had a strong passion for ornithology and great knowledge of it.

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