Arthur Hazelius

Artur Immanuel Hazelius (30 November 1833 – 27 May 1901), Swedish teacher, scholar and folklorist, founder of the Nordic Museum and the open-air museum Skansen in .

Hazelius was born in Stockholm, son of Johan August Hazelius, an Army officer (with terminal rank of major general), politician and publicist. He entered Uppsala University in 1854, and received his Ph.D. degree in 1860, after which he worked as a teacher, as well as participating in several school-book and language reform projects.

In 1869 Artur Hazelius was the secretary of the Swedish section at the Scandinavian orthographic congress in Stockholm (det nordiska rättstavningsmötet), and published its proceedings in 1871. The radical reforms in Swedish spelling proposed there sparked opposition from the Swedish Academy and gave Johan Erik Rydqvist (1800–1877) the energy to publish the very conservative 1st edition of the Academy's one volume spelling dictionary in 1874 (Svenska Akademiens Ordlista). However, many of the proposals from the congress were introduced in the 6th edition of the same dictionary in 1889 (e-ä, qv-kv) and the rest (dt, fv, hv) in a spelling reform for Swedish schools, introduced in 1906 by the minister of education Fridtjuv Berg (1851–1916). Berg acknowledged that Hazelius had laid the foundation for all following spelling reforms.

During travels in the country, Hazelius noticed how Swedish folk culture, including architecture and other aspects of the material culture, was eroding under the influence of industrialization, migration and other processes of modernity, and in 1872 he decided to establish a museum for Swedish ethnography, originally (1873) called the Scandinavian ethnographic collection (Skandinavisk-etnografiska samlingen), from 1880 the Nordic Museum (Nordiska Museum, now Nordiska museet). In 1891 he established the open-air museum Skansen, which became the model for other open-air museums in Northern Europe. He got the idea after a visit to the world's first open-air museum, the royal collection of buildings established near Oslo in 1881.

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