René Dérolez (1921-2005)
René Derolez (Aalst, 1921 – Bruges, 2005) studied Germanic philology at Ghent University, where he obtained a licentiate degree in 1943. A few years later, in 1947, he received the degree of Master of Arts at Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts). While at Harvard he carried out research on runes and related areas of study and was soon awarded a PhD in this field, followed by a Special PhD, the equivalent of a ‘Habilitation’. In 1959 he was granted a professorship in English and Old Germanic Linguistics at Ghent University, where he led that department until his retirement in 1986.
Derolez’ scholarly work was internationally recognised and highly valued. Proof of this recognition was his appointment to the prestigious Francqui chair at the University of Liège (1975) and the many posts he held in academic associations and foundations in Belgium and abroad. Only a few of these posts are mentioned here by way of example: he was associate editor of Anglo-Saxon England and of the Journal of Indo-European Studies, Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, a member of numerous linguistic societies, president of the International Conference on Anglo-Saxon Glossography (1986) and the first president of ISSEME. For many years, Derolez was chief editor of the journal English Studies. He was also a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and the Arts.
Derolez will be remembered as a specialist in Runic Studies, Old Germanic Culture and Old English philology. His Runica Manuscripta: The English Tradition (1954) was groundbreaking, as was his eye-opening monograph De godsdienst der Germanen (1959), which was translated into French (Les dieux et la religion des Germains,1962) and German (Götter und Mythen der Germanen,1963). In 1965 he published Les Celtes et les Germains together with A. Varagnac. Numerous articles in the field of Old Germanic Studies appeared in international journals and books.
Yet Derolez’s research interests were not limited to Old Germanic. His keen interest in all aspects of English linguistics is manifest in the many research projects he set up, as well as in the doctorates on various aspects of Old and Present-Day English he supervised. His course on Applied Linguistics bore witness to his vivid interest in the new directions in linguistic research. The projects he initiated within Contrastive Linguistics were also inspired by the same openness to all fields of linguistic study. His ever-inquiring mind and scholarly enthusiasm have left a mark on those who had the privilege of working in his department.
Anne-Marie Vandenbergen
Em. Prof. English Linguistics, Ghent University
Stanley Brian Greenfield (1922-1987)
Stanley B. Greenfield, professor of English at the University of Oregon from 1959-1986, teacher, scholar, bibliographer, and literary critic, recipient of many rewards and honors, was the visionary on our team. Calm, modest, determined, he was a man of utmost honesty and courage. Born in Brooklyn, he served in the U.S. Army from 1942-1946 after receiving his undergraduate degree from Cornell University. A doctoral student of Arthur G. Brodeur at Berkeley, in whose honor he later compiled a festschrift, Greenfield published in succession A Critical History of Old English Literature (1965), The Interpretation of Old English Poems (1972), A Readable Beowulf (1982), and A New Critical History of Old English Literature (1986), the last co-authored with Calder and including a survey of Anglo-Latin literature by Michael Lapidge. In his lifetime of scholarship he composed dozens of important articles and essays, including the prize-winning “Grammar and Meaning in Poetry” (1967). For a list of these and of his honors and awards, see Modes of Interpretation in Old English Literature, ed. Phyllis Rugg Brown et al. (1986), pp. 284-287; George H. Brown gathered up a selection of Greenfield’s essays in Hero and Exile: The Art of Old English Poetry (1987), a book that appeared in the year of their author’s death. Early on in his career, Greenfield tirelessly served the field by compiling the annual Old English bibliographies for the Old English Group of the Modern Language Association (1951-1962). Later, with Fred C. Robinson, he published the magisterial Bibliography of Publications on Old English Literature to the End of 1972 (1980). His generosity extended not only to his students but also to the profession at large. As he was leaving a Toronto reception one evening, I overheard John Leyerle saying softly to him: “Stanley, you are a great man.” John was right.
Roberta Frank
Daniel Gillmore Calder (1939-1994)
Daniel Calder, an esteemed collaborator who inspired others to join in accomplishing shared goals, was born in Lubec, Maine, the easternmost town in the United States; he grew up on Campobello Island just across the bay in Canada. He received his Ph.D. in English from Indiana University in 1969 – after a stint (1962-1964) teaching theater in Bowdoin College, Maine (his undergraduate alma mater). There he famously coached its College Bowl team, which retired undefeated after a winning streak of many weeks. Daniel Calder was multi-talented, as teacher, administrator, and trusted leader, and to the end remained passionate about the promise of higher education. He chaired the UCLA English Department from 1983-1990 and then served as the first academic Associate Dean of the School of Theater, Film, and Television. In his final years, Dan fostered gay and lesbian literature at UCLA (he was one of the founders of its Gay and Lesbian Faculty and Staff Network) and was working on a study of contemporary gay literature when he died.
His books and articles on Old English verse and its styles had a major impact. His two co-authored volumes on the sources and analogues of specific Old English poems were much consulted: Sources and Analogues of Old English Poetry: The Major Latin Texts in Translation, with Michael J. B. Allen (1976); and Sources and Analogues of Old English Poetry II: The Major Germanic and Celtic Texts in Translation, with Robert E. Bjork, Patrick K. Ford, and Daniel F. Melia (1983). He compiled a sixty-five page introduction “The Study of Style in Old English Poetry: A Historical Introduction” to Calder, ed., Old English Poetry: Essays on Style (1979). He authored the sections on Old English prose in Stanley Greenfield’s A New Critical History of Old English Literature (1986), and edited, with T. Craig Christy, Germania: Comparative Studies in the Old Germanic Languages and Literatures (1988). He composed several articles and a separate book (1981) on the poetic art of Cynewulf, an essay on Andreas for the Greenfield festschrift noted above, and more than a dozen other judicious essays on individual Old English poems. Two of his former students: Carol Braun Pasternack and Lisa M. C. Weston, published Sex and Sexuality in Anglo-Saxon England: Essays in Memory of Daniel Gillmore Calder (2004). It opens with an appreciative preface by Robert Bjork not only on the dedicatee’s contribution to our discipline but also to his central role in the founding of ISAS.
Roberta Frank
Roberta Frank
Roberta Frank (alias “the Last Survivor”, Beo 2247-2266) started life with the street smarts of New York City, her hometown, a habit of mind which undoubtedly has contributed to her longevity. After graduating summa cum laude from New York University in1962, she studied under Morton Bloomfield at Harvard, completing her doctoral thesis in 1968 on “Wordplay in Old English Poetry” for which she won the Bowdoin Prize in the Humanities, For thirty-two years at the University of Toronto (where she attained the exalted rank of University Professor), and another twenty years at Yale (where she is the Marie Boroff Professor Emerita of English), she has taught generations of students how to understand the distant voices, mostly anonymous, of those poets who composed their verse in Old English and Old Norse. Her grateful students at each institution have celebrated her with festschriften: in 2005, former Toronto students Antonina Harbus and Russell Poole published Verbal Encounters: Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse Studies for Roberta Frank, and in 2019 Irina Dumitrescu and Eric Weiskott, former Yale students, published The Shapes of Early English Poetry in her honor. Yale’s Graduate Mentor Award in the Humanities (2016) and the Medieval Academy of America Award for Excellence in Teaching (2017) are further acknowledgements of her teaching prowess.
Roberta first came blazingly to the attention of her colleagues with her award-winning essay, “Some Uses of Paronomasia in Old English Scriptural Verse” (1972), for which she received the Medieval Academy’s prestigious Elliott Prize. This stellar beginning continued with her first book, Old Norse Court Poetry: The Dróttkvæt Stanza (1978), considered by some as the single best book in Norse studies. Her most recent book, The Etiquette of Early Northern Verse (2022) teaches us – with brilliant and stylish wit – how to read between the half-lines of the Old English scops and the Viking skalds. Together with the scores of essays she has written over her storied career, Roberta represents the best our field can offer: superb mastery of her subjects, bold originality, critical acuity, methodical precision – all delivered with a freshness and a modesty that is rare in academic writing. She is universally admired for her startling revisionism of encrusted ‘truths’ and also her uncanny ability to craft essay titles: “Skaldic Verse and the Date of Beowulf” (1981), “Viking Atrocity and Skaldic Verse: The Rite of the Blood-Eagle” (1984), “Did Anglo-Saxon Audiences Have a Skaldic Tooth?” (1987), “Beowulf and Sutton Hoo: The Odd Couple” (1992)”, “The Search for the Anglo-Saxon Oral Poet” (1993), “The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Philologist” (1997), “The Invention of the Viking Horned Helmet” (2000), “The Discreet Charm of the Old English Weak Adjective” (2003), “The Incomparable Wryness of Old English Poetry” (2006), “Conversational Skills for Heroes” (2014), “The Beaker in the Barrow, The Flagon with the Dragon: Accessorizing Beowulf” (2021), among many others. Her scholarly excellence has led to a number of prestigious honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, American Council of Learned Society Leave Fellowships, a Rockefeller Foundation (Bellagio) Residency. She has also been honored as a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America and as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. And still she has managed to give years of service to our discipline: she has served as General Editor and on the Editorial Board of more than a dozen publication series including the Toronto Old English Series and the Publications of the Dictionary of Old English, Anglo-Saxon England, and Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, as well as co-founding the progenitor of ISSEME and designing its logo. To be in Roberta’s company is both a delight and an education. She is generous and kind, funny and self-deprecating. She is one of the most brilliant and cherished colleagues in our field.
Antonette diPaolo Healey