William Craigie

Personal

Vocation

Notable

Sir William Alexander Craigie was a philologist and a lexicographer. A graduate of the University of St Andrews, he was the third editor of the Oxford English Dictionary and co-editor of the 1933 supplement. From 1916 to 1925 he was also Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon in the University of Oxford. He lectured on lexicography at the University of Chicago while working on the Dictionary of American English and the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, a project he pioneered. Many twentieth-century American lexicographers studied under Craigie as a part of his lectureship. Craigie was also fluent in Icelandic and an expert in the field of rímur. He made many valuable contributions in that field. His interest was awakened by a winter of study in Copenhagen, then the centre of Norse philology. He compiled the complete Oxford edition of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales, with hitherto untranslated tales being supplied by his wife. He befriended many of the great Norse philologists of the time and came across séra Einar Guðmundsson's seventeenth-century Skotlands rímur, dealing with the Gowrie Conspiracy, relating to the alleged murder of the Earl of Gowrie by King James VI of Scotland, who later became King James I of England. Link to Wikipedia