Vikander, Stig

Stig Vikander was born in Norrtalje in central Sweden in a family of a pharmacist. He graduated from high school in Uppsala at the age of seventeen and immediately entered the university of the city . Before he was nineteen years old, he achieved great success in learning Greek and Latin. After that, he went to study Iranian and Indian languages and religions in Paris, Berlin and Copenhagen, where Arthur Christinsen (1875-1945) was a professor.

Soon Vikander became known as a brilliant young scientist with wide interests and deep knowledge in many fields. In 1935 and 1936, he, along with Geo Wiedengren (1907-1996), took part in seminars on the Avesta , conducted by his senior compatriot, professor of Semitic languages ​​at Uppsala University, H. S. Nyberg (1889-1974). In 1938, Wikander defended his dissertation at the Uppsala University School of Art, becoming the first candidate for Iranian languages and religion in Sweden. His study of the lexical evidence of Sanskrit and the Avestan language on the religious significance of young warrior groups was published under the name Der arische Männerbund ( Aryan Men's Unions ). This work was largely determined by the studies of Austrian folklorist Otto Höffler (1901-1987), who between 1928 and 1934 was a teacher of German at Lund University . In January 1938, Höffler was appointed professor of German philology and folklore at the University of Munich , where Wikander taught Swedish in 1938-39. In 1941, he published his research on the Indo-Iranian god of the wind, Vayu . Subsequently, Lund University granted Wikander the right to lecture and appointed him a teacher (assistant professor) of Iranian languages. At the end of World War II, he served as a delegate of the Red Cross to Greece and Turkey.

During the academic year 1947-1948, Wikander taught religious history as a visiting professor at Uppsala University, where in 1953 he was appointed chief specialist in Sanskrit and Indo-European comparative studies (comparative linguistics). Wikander retired in 1974. Among his students were Folke Yosefson (b. 1934), professor of comparative Indo-European linguistics at the University of Gothenburg (b. 1934), professor of the Department of Indology Gunilla Gren-Eklund (b. 1938) and professor of the Department of Iranian Studies at Uppsala University Bu Utas (b. 1938). Wikander’s wife, Gunnel Heikel (1911–73), was a nurse with three daughters.

Wikander was an internationally active scholar and maintained lively contacts with leading religious scholars. The degree of his friendship with Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) is documented by their recently published correspondence ^[1] . At the beginning of his career, Vikander made friends with Georges Dumézil (1898-1986), who taught French at Uppsala University between 1931 and 1933 . Dumezil drew attention to the research of Wikander (1947, 1949) to develop his theory of Indo-European religion ^[2] . In the academic year 1959-60, Wikander was a visiting professor at Columbia University, New York, and in 1967 he taught at the College of Mexico, Mexico. In October and November 1967, at the invitation of Eliade , Vikander gave lectures on the mythological and national epic at the University of Chicago ^[3] .

• Der arische Männerbund: Studien zur indo-iranischen Sprach- und Religionsgeschichte, Lund, 1938. ("Aryan male unions: a study in the history of Indo-Iranian languages ​​and religions")
• Vayu: Texte und Untersuchungen zur indo-iranischen Religionsgeschichte, Quaestiones Indo-Iranicae 1, Uppsala and Leipzig, 1941. (“ Vayu : texts and studies on the history of Indo-Iranian religions”)
• Feuerpriester in Kleinasien und Iran, Acta Regia Societatis humaniorum litterarum Lundensis 40, Lund, 1946. ("Priests of Fire in Asia Minor and Iran ")
• “Pāṇḍavasagan och Mahābhāratas mystiska förutsättningar”, Religion och Bibel 6, 1947, pp. 27-39; tr. as “La légende des Pândava et la substructure mythique du Mahâbhârata”, in Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus: IV - Explication de textes indiens et latins, by G. Dumézil, Bibliothèque de l'Ecole des hautes études: Section des sciences religieuses 62.4, Paris, 1948, pp. 37-53.
• "Sur le fonds commun indo-iranien des épopées de la Perse et de l'Inde", La nouvelle Clio: Revue mensuelle de la découverte historique 1-2, 1949, pp. 310-29. ("The Common in the Indo-Iranian Epic of Persia and India ")
• Recueil de texts kourmandji, Uppsala Universitets Årsskrift 10, Uppsala, 1959.
• "Maya and Altaic: Is the Maya Group of Languages ​​Related to the Altaic Family", Ethnos 32, 1967, pp. 141-48. (“Maya and Altai languages: does the Maya language group belong to the Altai family ”)
• Maya and Altaic II, Ethnos 35, 1970, pp. 80-88.
• Maya and Altaic III, Orientalia Suecana 21, 1972, pp. 186-204.
• Araber, vikingar, väringar, Svenska humanistiska förbundet 90, Lund, 1978. (" Arabs , Vikings , Varangians ")

• B. Lincoln , “Rewriting the German War God: Georges Dumézil, Politics and Scholarship in the Late 1930s”, History of Religions 37, 1998, pp. 187-208.
• CS Littleton , The New Comparative Mythology: An Anthropological Assessment of the Theories of Georges Dumézil, 3rd ed., Berkeley, Calif., 1982, pp. 156-61 about Wikander; orig. ed., 1966.
• M. Timuş , Les Les Haskell Lectures de Stig Wikander, Archaeus 8, 2004, pp. 265-322.
• M. Timuş , Întotdeauna orientul: Corespondenta Mircea Eliade - Stig Wikander 1948-1977 (Always the Orient: The correspondence between Mircea Eliade and Stig Wikander), with a preface by Giovanni Casadio and an afterword by Frantz Grenet, Iaşi (Rumania), 2005 .

• Stig Wikander // Encyclopaedia Iranica