Stephen J. Herben Jr.

Stephen Joseph Herben Jr. (14 March 1897 – 22 December 1967) was an American professor of philology at Bryn Mawr College. He specialized in English and German philology, and among other places did work at the American-Scandinavian Foundation in Copenhagen and Oxford University, as well as at Rutgers, Princeton, and Stanford University. His work included assistance with the etymological work of the second edition of ''Webster's New International Dictionary'', and two articles on medieval literary descriptions of weapons and armor. The second of these articles, "Arms and Armour in Chaucer", is still considered a standard on the subject.

Herben was the son of Grace Foster Herben and Rev. Stephen Joseph Herben Sr., a Methodist missionary and minister, respectively. He married twice, to Mary Shattuck, another academic then beginning her career in psychology, from 1921 to 1929, and to Caroline Robbins, a professor of history at Bryn Mawr and the sister of Lionel Robbins, from 1932 until his death. He died at the age of 70, and has an endowed fund in his name at Bryn Mawr.

Early life and education

Stephen Joseph Herben Jr. was born on 14 March 1897 to Grace Foster Herben and Stephen Joseph Herben Sr. He was the younger brother of George Foster Herben, who was born on 17 March 1893.

Like both his father and brother, Herben Jr. attended Evanston Academy in Illinois. In September 1914 he matriculated at Rutgers University. Two months later, earlier employment in the forestry commission came in useful when an estate on which he was hunting caught fire and he was put in charge of the volunteer firefighters. His graduation was delayed by the American intervention in World War I, for by May 1917 Herben Jr. had been made responsible for organizing an ambulance corps of twenty-five Rutgers students to be trained by the surgeon Fred H. Albee and serve in the war. On 5 August he sailed for Savenay, France, part of the Base Hospital Unit No. 8 Post Graduate Hospital, New York. A spell of scarlet fever in February landed him in the hospital as a patient, stricken enough that a letter home had to be dictated to a fellow Rutgers student, but in July he was sent back stateside via Ellis Island and granted a brief furlough to visit home. By October he was back in France; so too was his father, who had volunteered to serve as a chaplain with the American Red Cross. Herben Jr. was promoted to sergeant in November 1918, and discharged as disabled on 31 March 1919. He finally graduated from Rutgers in June 1920, with a Bachelor of Letters.

Herben Jr. graduated from Princeton University on 20 July 1922, with the award of a $1,000 fellowship by The American-Scandinavian Foundation. The following year he left for his fellowship at the University of Copenhagen with his newlywed wife, who helped with his research into the Scandinavian backdrop of the Anglo-Saxon epic ''Beowulf''; two years later, following a second year abroad as a special coach in Old English at Oxford, his return occasioned headlines proclaiming that he had discovered the site of Heorot, the fabled mead hall and seat of King Hrothgar, where the hero Beowulf travels in search of the monster Grendel. A decade later, in 1935, a paper by Herben Jr. titled simply "Heorot" placed the hall northeast of Roskilde, on the basis of the place names ''Stor Hiort'' and ''Lille Hiorte'' on an 18th-century map; the suggestion went against the conventional belief that Heorot was based on a settlement at Lejre

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