Rudolf Simek

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Rudolf 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 been translated into English, French, Icelandic, and Spanish. He has held visiting professorships on four continents. And the subjects he takes seriously -- trolls, sea monsters, Viking ships, runes, and the cosmological imagination of medieval Norway -- are ones that mainstream scholarship spent centuries dismissing as folklore.

  How did an Austrian philologist become one of the foremost authorities on Old Norse religion, Viking exploration, and the monsters that prowled the edges of medieval maps? And what does it tell us that the same scholar who wrote a lexicon of Germanic mythology also wrote a book tracing the troll from its origins in Norse myth all the way to the internet?

• 2. The Bonn Chair

  ›

  Since 1995, Simek has held the position of Professor and Chair of Ancient German and Nordic Studies at the University of Bonn, a post that anchors the rest of his far-flung academic life. The appointment placed him at one of Germany's most established research universities, giving him a permanent base from which to pursue what is, by any measure, an unusually wide research agenda.

  In 1999, he was appointed Professor of Comparative Religion at the University of Tromsø in Norway, and the following year he accepted a professorship in Old Nordic Studies at the University of Sydney. His research stays have taken him to the universities of Reykjavik, Copenhagen, London, and Oxford, among others. Between 2000 and 2003, he served as Chairman of the International Saga Society, known in German as the Internationale Saga-Gesellschaft, a body dedicated to the scholarly study of Old Norse sagas.

  His membership in learned societies reads like a map of his intellectual range: the Viking Society for Northern Research, the Society for Northern Studies, the International Arthurian Society, the Österreichische Gesellschaft für Germanistik, and the Royal Gustavus Adolphus Academy. Each affiliation marks a different corridor of the medieval world he has made it his business to explore.

• 3. Mapping Germanic Myth

  ›

  In 1984, Simek published the Lexikon der germanischen Mythologie, a comprehensive reference work on Germanic mythology issued by the Stuttgart publisher Kröner. It was subsequently translated into English, French, and Icelandic, reaching audiences who had no access to German scholarship and filling a gap that had been left open for a long time in those languages.

  Three years later, in 1987, he co-authored the Lexikon der altnordischen Literatur with Hermann Pálsson, also with Kröner, giving scholars a companion reference specifically for Old Norse literary sources. These two lexicons together established Simek as a reliable cartographer of a complex terrain, someone willing to do the systematic, often thankless work of collecting and clarifying material that other scholars draw on without necessarily organizing it themselves.

  His Religion und Mythologie der Germanen, published in 2003, and Götter und Kulte der Germanen, published in 2004, returned to the same territory with what appears to be a sustained desire to reach both specialist and general readers. The 2004 volume appeared with C.H. Beck in Munich, a publisher he returned to repeatedly throughout his career.

• 4. The Cosmos and the Ship

  ›

  In 1990, Simek published Altnordische Kosmographie, a study of world-images and world-descriptions in Norway and Iceland from the 12th to the 14th century, issued by de Gruyter in Berlin and New York as part of the Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde supplementary volumes. The subject was medieval cosmological thinking: how people in the Norse world pictured the shape and structure of the universe they inhabited.

  Two years later, in 1992, C.H. Beck in Munich published Erde und Kosmos im Mittelalter, bringing the subject of medieval science and cosmology to a broader German-language audience. It is a thread that runs through his career -- the conviction that medieval people held sophisticated, internally coherent pictures of the world, and that those pictures deserve to be taken seriously on their own terms.

  His 2014 book Die Schiffe der Wikinger, published by Reclam in Stuttgart, turned from cosmology to the physical world of the Viking Age. The ship was not merely a vessel for the Norse; it was a cultural object that carried the dead, enabled trade, and made possible the Atlantic crossings that Simek addressed directly two years later in Vinland! Wie die Wikinger Amerika entdeckten, published by C.H. Beck in 2016.

• 5. Monsters at the Margins

  ›

  In 2015, Böhlau published Simek's Monster im Mittelalter, a study of the fantastic world of monstrous peoples and fabulous creatures that populated medieval imagination. The book appeared again in 2019 with the same publisher, suggesting enough demand to warrant a new edition. Medieval monsters were not merely decorative: they marked the edges of the known world on maps, populated traveler's tales, and carried moral and theological freight that Simek takes seriously.

  His 2018 book Trolle, also from Böhlau, traced the troll from its origins in Norse mythology through to the internet, a scope that spans roughly a thousand years. The same year, Reclam published his Die Geschichte der Normannen, tracing the Normans from Viking chieftains to the kings of Sicily -- a sweep of history that connects the Norse world to the Mediterranean and to the political structures of medieval Europe.

  The 2004 volume Runes, Magic and Religion: A Sourcebook, co-authored with John McKinnell and Klaus Düwel and published in Vienna by Fassbaender, approached a different kind of marginal knowledge: the inscriptions and magical uses of runic script. The collaboration with McKinnell and Düwel brought together specialists from different scholarly traditions to produce a sourcebook rather than an argument, giving other researchers the raw material to draw their own conclusions.

• 6. Tolkien and the Norse

  ›

  In 2005, C.H. Beck published Simek's Mittelerde -- Tolkien und die germanische Mythologie, a book that placed J.R.R. Tolkien's fictional world in direct relation to the Germanic mythological tradition that Simek had spent his career studying. The title is a German rendering of "Middle-earth," and the book examines how Tolkien drew on the same Norse and Germanic sources that fill Simek's scholarly lexicons.

  The choice of subject is not as surprising as it might first appear. Tolkien was himself a philologist, and his invented world was built from the same raw material -- Eddic poetry, Old Norse cosmology, Germanic heroic legend -- that Simek had been mapping since the 1980s. For Simek, the book represented an opportunity to show a general audience what those sources actually contained, using a text that millions of readers already cared about as a way into a tradition they might otherwise never encounter.

  Also in 2005, the Lahn-Verlag published Der Glaube der Germanen, Simek's treatment of Germanic religious belief, rounding out what had become by mid-decade a remarkably complete account of the pre-Christian Germanic world. His 2007 volume on the Edda, published by C.H. Beck as part of their Wissen series, made the foundational text of Norse mythology accessible to readers who came to it without specialized training.