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Runic Writing in the Germanic Languages (RuneS)
Obituary Prof. Dr. Alfred Bammesberger
It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Prof. Dr. Alfred Bammesberger on 7 January 2025.
Alfred Bammesberger was born in Munich in 1938; he studied English and French at the University of Munich and became a teacher at secondary level (the German Gymnasium). As he was also fascinated by Comparative Linguistics, he worked on his PhD thesis during his stay at Yale University in 1963/1964 (published in 1965 under the title of Deverbative jan-Verba des Altenglischen).
From 1968 onwards, he worked as a research assistant at Freiburg University where he wrote his habilitation thesis (Habilitationsschrift), Der Aufbau des germanischen Verbalsystems. Accepting the call to the Catholic University of Eichstätt, he remained there from 1980 to 2006. Although he received further calls from universities in the whole of Germany, he stayed loyal to the university and the town of Eichstätt, nestled in the Jurassic valley of the Altmühl river, whose true etymology he revealed to the public in one of his many newspaper articles. He was always dedicated to the Bavarian dialect and Bavarian traditions. His last book, Münchnerisch (2023), is an analysis of his own variety of Bavarian, the dialect of Munich. This book was not only intended for linguists but has also attracted a wider audience.
His extraordinary linguistic expertise encompassed Germanic languages (also in their older stages, such as Old English and Old High German), Latin, Irish, and Baltic, to name but a few, and was reflected in more than 12 monographes. Runes and runology was another special field, which he focused on, publishing widely. When the long-term project RuneS (‘Runic Writing in the Germanic Languages’), funded by the Union of the German Academies under the umbrella of the Lower-Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Göttingen, started in 2010, he became one of the leaders of the research unit Eichstätt. At the many conferences he organized in the various fields, he not only brought researchers of great renown to Eichstätt, but also edited conference proceedings of great value (e.g., Britain 400‒600: Language and History (1990); Old English Runes and their Continental Background (1991); Pforzen und Bergakker (1999); Das fuþark und seine einzelsprachlichen Weiterentwicklungen (2006)). Alfred Bammesberger was a prolific writer and researcher; the number of his articles by far exceeds 500. Moreover, he was also the editor of the periodical Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Sprachforschung.
Alfred Bammesberger supported his staff whenever he could and, more importantly, he gave them the freedom and the space to develop. He created a friendly and relaxed atmosphere for both his staff and his students. The affection for their “Bammi”, as they called him, became clear when his students organized a torchlight parade to his house to persuade him to renounce a call to another university. Students called his lectures and seminars “thrillers”. For his students and younger colleagues alike, Alfred Bammesberger succeeded in opening a window to language, be it older or modern language stages by comparing languages and dialects that were so different on the surface but so very similar when looking at their roots.
One of these languages, Lithuanian, he used to listen to on the radio. Soon after the collapse of the Iron Curtain, Alfred Bammesberger and his wife were able to undertake a research journey to Lithuania, which gave him the opportunity to experience the language in everyday situations. This also opened the doors for school exchange programmes in the town of Eichstätt.
Through his extraordinary multilinguality and his sound scholarly expertise, Alfred Bammesberger was one of the greatest philologists in present-day Germany, and he was at the same time the kindest and most modest person imaginable. He himself said in a newspaper interview in 2023: “I am grateful for my time at the Altmühl river”.
Alfred Bammesberger will be much mourned, but he will also be remembered with deep affection as well as high scholarly respect.
Kiel (project coordination)
Dr. Christiane Zimmermann