Stefán Einarsson (9 June 1897 – 9 April 1972) was an Icelandiclinguist and literary historian, who was a professor atJohns Hopkins University inBaltimore in the United States.
Stefán was born and raised on the farm of Höskuldsstaðir inBreiðdalur. His parents were Einar Gunnlaugsson and his wife Margrét Jónsdóttir.[1] After attending school inAkureyri and graduating in 1917 from theMenntaskólinn inReykjavík,[2] he attended theUniversity of Iceland and completed a master's degree inIcelandic in 1923–24; while a student, he assistedSigfús Blöndal and Jón Ófeigsson on the Icelandic dictionary for four years.[3] He then studiedphonetics at theUniversity of Helsinki in 1924–25 and at theUniversity of Cambridge and completed his PhD at theUniversity of Oslo with a dissertation on the phonetics of Icelandic.[4]
He became a faculty member at Johns Hopkins the same year, 1927, at the invitation ofKemp Malone, for whom he had recorded a study text in Icelandic,[5] and worked there until his retirement in 1962. He taught primarily in the English department, in the fields ofOld Norse andOld English, and beginning in 1945, Scandinavian literature. He became Professor of ScandinavianPhilology in 1945.[6][7] He remained loyal to Iceland, accepting all invitations to contribute articles about Iceland to reference works and becoming one of the founding officers of the Icelandic Patriotic Society, for whose journal he wrote at least one article a year.[8] He editedHeimskringla, the Icelandic newspaper published inWinnipeg. In 1942 he was appointed Icelandicvice-consul in Baltimore; from 1952 to 1962, when he retired from Johns Hopkins, he served as consul.[7][9] After retirement he moved back to Iceland and lived in Reykjavík until his death (in Hrafnista nursing home);[10] he was awarded aGuggenheim fellowship for 1962–63.[11]
He played violin and piano and drew and painted well;[2] several of his works include illustrations by him.[12] He was married twice. His first wife, Margarethe Schwarzenberg[13] (26 May 1892 – 7 January 1953), was an Estonian historian. They had no children. Her ashes are buried with his at the family farm.[4][14][15] His second wife, whom he married in December 1954, was Ingibjörg Árnadóttir[4][7] (1896–1980), fromNjarðvík, a relative ofHalldór Hermannsson, the librarian of theFiske Icelandic collection atCornell University.[16] She had four children from a previous marriage.
Stefán Einarsson published prolifically, over 500 books and articles in all.[17] In addition to books and articles on linguistic and literary topics, in English he published a grammar of the Icelandic language (which grew out of a wartime Armed Forces course and contains a valuable glossary of Modern Icelandic words)[18][19] and two histories of Icelandic literature, one of the first treatments of modern Icelandic literature[20] and the other the first survey spanning the entire national literature from the settlement to the contemporary period, including émigré literature.[21] He was the first Icelander to take a structuralist approach to Icelandic phonetics, and an early explorer of the idea of a link betweenskaldic and Latin meter.[22] In Icelandic, in addition to two further books on Icelandic literature, one of them an expansion of his general survey published in English,[23] he also co-edited and wrote a large part of a book on the history of his native Breiðdalur and was responsible for two of the annuals of theFerðafélag Íslands, coveringEastern Region. His publications show three areas of emphasis: Icelandic language and culture as revealed in literature; the East Fjords; and great living Icelanders, particularlySigurður Nordal, with whom he studied,Þórbergur Þórðarson, andHalldór Laxness.[24] Early in his career, at Sigurður's urging, he wrote a biography ofEiríkr Magnússon, who was his maternal great uncle.[25] However, he ranged extremely widely in his reviews, "from Medieval Latin to Strindberg and Icelandic telephone directories."[26]
He was also on the editorial boards of theJournal of English and Germanic Philology,Modern Language Notes, andScandinavian Studies (and Notes).[27]
Stefán was an honorary member of numerous learned societies, including theAmerican Philosophical Society, to which he was only the second Icelander to be elected.[4] He was awarded the Knight's Cross of theOrder of the Falcon, Iceland's highest honour, in 1939,[28] and in 1962 received an honorary doctorate from the University of Iceland.[27]
There is a room dedicated to his work at theBreiðdalur Institute inBreiðdalsvík.[15][23]
