Bruce Mitchell (scholar)

Raymond Bruce Mitchell (8 January 1920 – 30 January 2010) was a scholar of Old English.

Mitchell was born in Lismore, New South Wales. He won a free place at the University of Melbourne but was unable to take it up and instead after leaving school at 15, worked as a student teacher while studying part-time. He earned a general Arts degree.

He was commissioned as a lieutenant in 1940 and served as an intelligence officer in the Australian Imperial Force from 1941 to 1946. He then ran a printing company before returning to the university, again part-time while working as a gardener, builders' labourer and railway porter, and tutoring English at the university. He took Firsts in English Language and Literature in 1948 and in Comparative Philology in 1952.

He entered Merton College, Oxford, on a scholarship in 1952, the same year he married Mollie Miller, who had accompanied him from Australia. They received permission to be married from Mitchell's supervisor, J.R.R. Tolkien. He received a doctorate in 1959 with a thesis entitled Subordinate Clauses in Old English Poetry. In 1986 he gained the degree of D.Litt (Oxon) for his contribution to Old English studies.

Mitchell was a Fellow and a Tutor at St Edmund Hall, Oxford from 1954 to 1987, and after retirement was elected an emeritus fellow. Though he spent his entire life in Oxford since age 32, he never lost his Australian accent, and displayed his heritage by having an Australian flag and a eucalyptus tree in his garden.

His specialty was Old English language and literature and particularly Beowulf; his textbooks on Old English language are considered classics in the field, as is his edition of Beowulf, which he published with Fred C. Robinson. His "magisterial" and "phenomenal" book on Old English syntax is still the standard reference work in the field.

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