Stig Wikander

Stig Wikander, born 27 August 1908 in Norrtälje, died 20 December 1983, was a Swedish indologist, iranologist and historian of religions. He was professor of Sanskrit and comparative Indo-European philology at Uppsala University from 1953 until his retirement in 1974. He wrote in German and Swedish. He was visiting professor at Columbia University in 1959-1960 and taught at El Colegio de México in Mexico City in 1967. Early in his career he befriended Georges Dumézil and he had an extensive correspondence with Mircea Eliade.^[1]

His research on Indo-European religion became influential and was developed further by Dumézil and others. Together with the linguist Bertil Malmberg he founded the journal Studia Linguistica in 1947. His last monograph was a book on Arab accounts of Scandinavians in the Viking Age, Araber, vikingar, väringar ("Arabs, Vikings, Varangians").^[1]

Selected works

• Der arische Männerbund : Studien zur indo-iranischen Sprach- und Religionsgeschichte, Lund, Ohlsson, 1938 (Ph.D. thesis).
• Vayu : Texte und Untersuchungen zur indo-iranischen Religionsgeschichte, t. 1. Texte, Uppsala-Leipzig, 1941.
• Gudinnan Anahita och den zoroastiska eldskulten, Uppsala, 1942.
• Feuerpriester in Kleinasien und Iran (Acta Regia Societatis humaniorum litterarum Lundensis, 40), Lund, 1946.
• "Pāṇḍavasagan och Mahābhāratas mystiska förutsättningar", Religion och Bibel 6, 1947, pp. 27-39.
• Araber, vikingar, väringar (Svenska humanistiska förbundet 90), Lund, 1978.

References

Further reading

• Timuş, Mihaela (2002). "Enigmaticul Stig Oscar Wikander". România Literară (in Romanian) (22). ISSN 1220-6318.