Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1941, Side 145

IRANIAN RESEARCH IN THE NORTH
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attached to one of his Pahlavi MSS one reads: “This manuscript
is hereby bequeathed to the University Library. Copenhagen,
September 9th, 1878. N. L. Westergaard”. — On the same day
he died.
In subsequent years too, Danish scholars have proved them-
selves worthy inheritors of the traditions established by Rask
and Westergaard and of the manuscript treasures bequeathed by
them. They have shown their ability to keep abreast of the new
problems, and ways of approaching them, which have emerged
in their time, and to cope with the overwhelming mass of fresh
material brought to light by new manuscript finds in Central
Asia.
A representative of the recently founded science of the history
of religion, Edvard Lehmann, took up the study of Parsism
during his earlier career, and in 1896 he got his doctor’s degree
by a thesis on the relations between religion and civilization
in the Avesta. About 1900 he published his “Zarathustra, en Bog
om Persernes gamle Religion” (Zarathustra, a Book about the
Ancient Religion of the Persians) in two volumes. This book,
which was translated into several languages, is one of the earliest
surveys of the whole subject. It has exercised considerable in-
fluence, though there is, needless to say, much in it which bears
the stamp of the time in which it was written and on which
later investigations and more recent approaches to the subject
have thrown a different light.
Copenhagen is one of the not very numerous universities
which have a separate chair of Iranology. Its present holder,
Professor Arthur Christensen, occupies a central position within
the field of Iranian lore, not only because of his wide knowledge
and his published work, covering as they do almost every branch
of Iranology, but also by his keen interest in all the manifestations
of human life to-day.
In a number of papers he has dealt with problems connected
with the Avesta, both from a historical angle and from the
point of view of the history of religion, myths, and legends. He
is one of the scholars who with most success have attempted to
disentangle the different threads of the complicated web of the
Avesta, and to establish the relative chronology of the various
strata of which it is composed, a work which had to be done
before any real understanding of the growth of the old Iranian
religion and legends could be arrived at. In opposition to several