Svend Frederiksen

Svend Edmund Jens Theilgaard Frederiksen (born August 31, 1906 in Sisimiut , † July 20, 1967 in Washington, DC ) was a Danish - Greenlandic - American Eskimologist .

Life

Living in Greenland and Denmark

Svend Frederiksen was born in Sisimiut in 1906, where his father Valdemar Christoffer Frederiksen (1872–1943) was a pastor. His mother was Agnes Emonie Margrethe Ingeborg Theilgaard (1875–1945). His father was from Troense on Tåsinge , while his mother was born in Copenhagen . His father was very interested in the Greenlandic language and culture and wrote several Greenlandic school books and scientific articles. He let his son grow up monolingual in Greenland so that he would have fewer language problems in Greenland. Svend Frederiksen didn't learn Danish until school.

In 1921 the family moved to Denmark, where Svend Frederiksen trained as a teacher. On July 5, 1931, he married his Greenlandic childhood friend Helene Sofia Frederikke Olsen (1906-1967), daughter of the carpenter Jens Niels David Olsen (1864-1919) and his wife Karen Justine Flavia Thaarup (1863-1919) in Copenhagen. She was a sister of Pastor Jens Olsen (1894–1966). Svend Frederiksen completed his training in the same year and returned to Greenland, where he became a teacher at Ilinniarfissuaq . At that time, Aage Bugge was head of the seminar, which had wooed the wife of his colleague in vain. Aage Bugge is said to have dismissed Svend Frederiksen a year later out of anger that Helene Frederiksen had not responded to his advances, which led to resentment among the population. Perhaps this was also because Svend Frederiksen believed that Greenlandic children should be taught in Greenlandic and that their first foreign language should be English, while Aage Bugge believed that teaching should only be in Danish.

Svend Frederiksen and his wife then returned to Denmark. In 1942 he began to study Eskimologie at the University of Copenhagen under William Thalbitzer . In 1945 he completed his studies. Along with Erik Holtved , he was one of only two who have been taught under Thalbitzer since Eskimology was taught at the university. In 1946 he first undertook field research in Canada and Alaska .

Living in the USA

In 1948 he got a job at Georgetown University in Washington, DC and emigrated to the United States with his wife and then four daughters. In 1951 his fifth daughter was born in the USA. In 1954 he moved to the Catholic University of America , which is also in the capital of the USA, and became a professor there. In the same year he received US citizenship. From 1957 to 1965 he undertook eight further field research trips to the north. Only through this did he return to his home country in 1961 for the first time in almost 30 years. An anecdote from this year is that he had to end his field research in Kuummiit without any results because, to his incomprehension, none of the residents wanted to talk to him and everyone was hiding in their houses. Johanne Andreassen, widow of Kârale Andreassen , was supposed to announce the visit of the professor, but did not know the word "professor" and thus warned the population of the arrival of a false prophet.

Svend Frederiksen died in Washington, DC, two months after his wife in 1967, aged 60, and was buried in Chester Gap , Rappahannock County , Virginia . His descendants live in the United States.

Svend Frederiksen published relatively little. All the greater was his private archive full of unpublished scientific manuscripts and other valuable documents that went to the Greenland National Library after his death . During his time in Denmark before studying, he wrote widely on Greenlandic subjects. Later he wrote mainly on the Greenlandic language , literature and poetry. In the time before his death, he specialized in common Inuit shamanism and the Inuit understanding of souls .

Published works

• 1939: Sprogspørgsmaalet i Grønland
• 1947: Aspects of European influence in West-Greenlandic poetry
• 1951: European influences in the poetry of Greenland
• 1952: Henrik Lund, a national poet of Greenland
• 1954: Stylistic forms in Greenland Eskimo litterature
• 1956: Recent literature in Greenland
• 1964: The 'primitive' Eskimo conception of souls
• 1964: Some preliminaries on the soul complex in Eskimo shamanistic belief
• 1967: Shaman language as a key to an understanding of Eskimo culture

literature

• Avijaja Albrechtsen: Svend Frederiksen - 1906–67 - eskimolog, anthropolog og projektmager . Ilisimatusarfik , Nuuk 2012 ( .pdf ).
• Klaus Georg Hansen: Overture til åbningen af ​​professor Svend Frederiksen's arkiv . In: Tidsskriftet Grønland . No. 1993/1 , p. 30-36 ( .pdf ).
• Klaus Georg Hansen: A resourceful eskimologist: Svend Frederiksen . In: Études / Inuit / Studies . tape 17 , no. 1 . Université Laval , 1993, p. 131-134 .
• Klaus Georg Hansen: Unveiling the treasures left by Svend Frederiksen . In: Études / Inuit / Studies . tape 21 , no. 1/2 . Université Laval , 1997, p. 245-248 .
• Angmalortoĸ Olsen: Helene Sofie and Svend Frederiksen . In: Peĸatigît Kalâtdlit . tape 25 , no. 5 , 1967, p. 33-35 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Church records Sisimiut 1905–1914 (Born boys p. 3)
2. ↑ ^{a b} Svend EJT Frederiksen at findagrave.com
3. ↑ ^{a b c} Hansen 1993: 34
4. ↑ ^{a b} Albrechtsen 2012
5. ↑ Hansen 1997: 245