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Ernst Moritz Ludwig Ettmuller

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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ERNST MORITZ LUDWIG ETTMULLER (1802-1877), German philologist, was born at Gersdorf near Lobau, in Saxony, on the 5th of October 1802. He was privately educated by his father, the Protestant pastor of the village, entered the gymnasium at Zittau in 1816 and studied from 182 3 to 1826 at the university of Leipzig. After a period of about two years during which he was partly abroad and partly at Gersdorf, he proceeded to Jena, where in 1830 he delivered, under the auspices of the university, a course of lectures on the old Norse poets. Three years later he was called to occupy the mastership of German language and literature at the Zurich gymnasium; and in 1863 he left the gymnasium for the university, with which he had been partially connected twenty years before. He died at Zurich in April 1877. To the study of English Ettmiiller contributed by an alliterative translation of Beowulf (1840), an Anglo-Saxon chrestomathy entitled Engla and Seaxna scows and boceras (1850), and a well-known Lexicon Anglo-Saxonicum (1851), in which the explanations and comments are given in Latin, but the words unfortunately are arranged according to their etymological affinity, and the letters according to phonetic relations. He edited a large number of High and Low German texts, and to the study of the Scandinavian literatures he contributed an edition of the Vdluspa (1831), a translation of the Lieder der Edda von den Nibelungen (1837) and an old Norse reading book and vocabulary. He was also the author of a Handbuch der deutschen Literaturgeschichte (1847), which includes the treatment of the Anglo-Saxon, the Old Scandinavian, and the Low German branches; and he popularized a great deal of literary information in his Herbstabende und Winterneichte: Gesprache fiber Dichtungen und Dichter (1865-1867). The alliterative versification which he admired in the old German poems he himself employed in his Deutsche Stammkonige (1844) and Das verhangnissvolle Zahnweh, oder Karl der Grosse und der Heilige Goar (1852).