John Lindow

• 1. Introduction

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  John 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 scholarly bodies of work on Old Norse religion and literature in the English-speaking world. What compels someone to dedicate a lifetime to the myths and legends of medieval Scandinavia? And what does it mean to become a recognized authority not just in one tradition but in several, spanning Old Norse, Scandinavian folklore, Sami and Finnish mythology, and Inuit religion? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. From Harvard to Berkeley

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  Harvard University is where Lindow first turned his attention seriously to Germanic languages and literatures, earning an A.B. magna cum laude in 1968. He stayed on, completing a PhD in the same field in 1972. That was the same year he joined the faculty at Berkeley, starting as Acting Assistant Professor. He moved through the ranks steadily: Assistant Professor from 1974, Associate Professor from 1977, and then full Professor of Scandinavian from 1983 onward. He eventually retired from active teaching as Professor Emeritus of Old Norse and Folklore. The path from Washington, D.C., through Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Berkeley, California, was one that placed him at the center of American Scandinavian scholarship for well over four decades.

• 3. Honors Across Borders

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  In 1977, the year Lindow was promoted to Associate Professor at Berkeley, he was also elected as a corresponding member of the Royal Gustavus Adolphus Academy, a Swedish institution devoted to the study of language, folklore, and history. That international recognition would come again decades later. In 2018, he received the Knight's Cross of the Order of the Falcon at the Icelandic president's residence, an honor awarded specifically for his scholarly contributions to Icelandic medieval literature. Between those two milestones, he was a Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala, Sweden, in 2013. He also holds membership in the American Folklore Society, the Medieval Academy of America, and the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study.

• 4. The Shape of His Scholarship

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  Lindow's first book, published in 1976, focused on comitatus, individual honor, and north Germanic institutional vocabulary, a study rooted in the linguistic structures that organized early medieval societies. Two years later came a collection of Swedish legends and folktales published by the University of California Press. His bibliography from the early 1980s includes Myths and Legends of the Vikings in 1980 and Viking Ships in 1982. By 1984 he had produced a full annotated bibliography of Scandinavian mythology for Garland Press. He co-edited a critical guide to Old Norse-Icelandic literature with Carol J. Clover in 1985, and the following year co-edited a volume on structure and meaning in Old Norse literature with Lars Lonnroth and Gerd Wolfgang Weber. His 1997 study, Murder Vengeance among the Gods, published by the Academia Scientiarum Fennica in Helsinki, turned its focus to Baldr, one of the most mysterious figures in Scandinavian mythology. A volume he co-edited with Carl Lindahl and John McNamara, Medieval Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Myths, Legends, Tales, Beliefs, and Customs, appeared in 2000 through ABC-CLIO.

• 5. Norse Mythology for a Wider Audience

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  Lindow's Handbook of Norse Mythology appeared in 2001, also published under the title Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs by Oxford University Press. It became one of his most widely cited works. Two years before his Order of the Falcon honor, he published Trolls: An Unnatural History through Reaktion Books in London in 2014, a title that carried his expertise into popular nonfiction. His most recent major work, Old Norse Mythology, appeared from Oxford University Press in 2021. He was also a co-editor of Pre-Christian Religions of the North: History and Structures, a multi-volume project published by Brepols, with the final volume appearing in 2020. That project is notable for its scale: four volumes devoted to reconstructing belief systems that predate the Christianization of northern Europe.