Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1941, Blaðsíða 147

IRANIAN RESEARCH IN THE NORTH 141
from the Caucasus. In addition to the above, Danish travellers
who were not themselves philologists have brought back with
them valuable dialect material from the Western and Eastern
borders of Iran.
Christensen’s pupil, Kaj Barr, successfully applies modern
linguistic methods to the study of Western Iranian dialects,
and has published an admirable edition of part of the important
dialect notes made by the late German Iranologist Andreas. In
addition he has done work in the Middle Persian field, i. a. by
completing the edition, begun by Andreas, of an interesting
Pahlavi psalter which belongs to the central Asiatic finds.
In Sweden, Iranology obtained a foothold later than in Den-
mark. The generation of Swedish linguists who, after the founda-
tion of the neogrammarian school in the 1870’s, worked with
so much energy and success on the etymological investigation of
the Indo-European languages, also made numerous contributions
to the study of the Iranian vocabulary. Special mention may
be made of Evald Lidén, whose wide knowledge of the Indo-
European languages, together with his exceptional power of com-
bination, enabled him to clear up the etymology of a number
of Iranian words, among them words from the Ossetic language,
which presents so many remarkable features. Among the younger
generation, Hannes Sköld, whose premature death was such a loss
to philology, studied Ossetic loan-words in Hungarian. These
are of interest, both to linguistic and cultural history, because
they throw light on the influence exercised on the Magyars by
Iranian peoples during the early wanderings of the former in
Southern Russia. In the course of a journey of exploration in
the Pamir, Sköld collected valuable material from Iranian “relic
languages” still spoken there, which was published in 1936 after
his death. J. Charpentier also included Iranian linguistics within
the wide sphere of his activities, and touched on problems of a
purely historical and philological character in several of his works,
as e. g. his treatise on the date of Zarathustra, in which he ad-
duces weighty reasons for placing the prophet at an earlier date
than many scholars have been inclined to do.
N. Söderblom, later on Archbishop of Upsala, approached
the study of Parsism from the point of view of the history of
teligion; his “Les Fravashis” (1899) and “La vie future d’aprés
le mazdéisme” (1901) contain ideas which have proved very
Le Nord, 1941, 2-3
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