Elard Hugo Meyer

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Elard Hugo Meyer (born October 6, 1837 in Bremen ; † February 11, 1908 in Freiburg im Breisgau ) was a German teacher, folklorist and Indo-Europeanist .

biography

education

Meyer was the son of a lawyer who had also been the city library in Bremen since 1838. Meyer graduated from the old grammar school in Bremen. From 1856 to 1860 he studied history as well as old and new philology at the University of Bonn , the University of Tübingen and the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin . From 1860 to 1862 he worked as a research assistant for the conservative historian Johann Martin Lappenberg in Hamburg, editing several chronicles.

job

In 1863 Meyer became a teacher at an elementary school in Bremen and then at the commercial school in Bremen . In 1876 the Senate appointed him professor and director of the commercial school. He published essays on medieval German and French poetry. He published a short work on the meaning of the name Bremen in 1864 and wrote about the study and teaching activities of Mayor Johann Smidt in 1873. From 1875 to 1878 he published the fourth edition of Jacob Grimm's German Mythology . In 1882 he fell ill, retired as a teacher and moved to Freiburg im Breisgau.

Honorary professor in Freiburg

In 1888 he became a private lecturer. From 1889 he taught first as a private lecturer and later as an honorary professor of folklore at the University of Freiburg . Among other things, he held lectures on Germanic mythology (each summer semester of 1890, 1897, 1899 and 1901).

An important work was Indo-European Myths from 1883. Here he showed that the Indo-European religion developed from a belief in the soul (animistic ancestor worship) to a belief in the spirit (belief in natural demons such as wind spirits and later weather and light spirits) to a belief in gods. The belief in gods only developed after the original Indo-European tribe was split up into several groups. The gods developed from the various natural demons, but mostly go back to light spirits. The first myths about the fight between the gods and the older demons also emerged. Similarities between different Indo-European gods also go back to the sameness of the models and an analogous development, but the gods themselves, in contrast to Max Müller's views , are not directly comparable.

He carried out a questionnaire on folklore. In 1898 he published a German folklore .

Fonts (selection)

  • Indo-European myths. 2 volumes. Dümmler, Berlin 1883–1987;
    • Volume 1: Gandharven - Centaurs.
    • Volume 2: Achilles.
  • Germanic mythology (= textbooks of Germanic philology. Vol. 1). Mayer & Müller, Berlin 1891.
  • German folklore. Karl J. Trübner, Strasbourg 1898 (reprint). Reprint-Verlag Leipzig, Holzminden 1997, ISBN 3-8262-1304-1 .
  • Baden folk life in the nineteenth century. Karl J. Trübner, Strasbourg 1900 (reprint, supplemented by a place register, a selection bibliography on recent custom research and a short biography on EH Meyer. (= Research and reports on folklore in Baden-Württemberg. Vol. 8). Theiss, Stuttgart 1984, ISBN 3-8062-0786-0 ). Digitized version of the 1900 edition in the Internet Archive
  • Germanic mythology, commonly presented . Karl J. Trübner, Strasbourg 1903.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Herbert Black Forest : The Great Bremen Lexicon . 2nd, updated, revised and expanded edition. Edition Temmen, Bremen 2003, ISBN 3-86108-693-X , S. #.
  2. ↑ Patricia Laukó: The Baden Folklore, Elard Hugo Meyer and his questionnaire campaign [1]

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Meyer, Elard Hugo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German folklorist and Indo-Europeanist
DATE OF BIRTH October 6, 1837
PLACE OF BIRTH Bremen
DATE OF DEATH February 11, 1908
Place of death Freiburg in Breisgau