W. F. H. Nicolaisen

Wilhelm Fritz Hermann Nicolaisen (13 June 1927 – 15 February 2016) was a folklorist, linguist, medievalist, scholar of onomastics and literature, educator, and author with specialties in Scottish and American studies.

W. F. H. Nicolaisen was born Wilhelm Fritz Hermann Nicolaisen on 13 June 1927, in Halle/Saale, in east-central Germany, near Leipzig. His father was a professor of agriculture. He attended the University of Kiel in Germany from 1948 to 1950 where he studied folklore, language, and literature. In 1950 he attended the King's College, Newcastle upon Tyne, now the University of Newcastle in England. He returned to Germany to study at the University of Tübingen, where he received his Dr. Phil. magna cum laude in comparative linguistics, English, and German in 1955. Among his professors were renowned folklorists Kurt Ranke and Walter Anderson. Having been awarded a "Scholarship for Advanced Studies in Arts" from the University of Glasgow, he later received Bachelor and Master of Letters degrees (1956, 1970) in Celtic Studies. His dissertation in Germany had been on the river names of the British Isles ("Die morphologisch und semasiologische Struktur der Gewassernamen der britischen Inseln") and in Glasgow, he focused on Scottish river names ("Studies in Scottish Hydronymy"). In 1958, he married May Marshall in Scotland and they had four children: Fiona, Kirsten, Moira, and Birgit.

At universities in Glasgow and Dublin Nicolaisen taught German language and literature and from 1956 to 1969 he worked in the School of Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh as head of the Scottish Place-Name Survey. He had research interests in language (particularly place names), in folklore (narrative and balladry), in literature (medieval classics and Scottish poets and novelists), and in cultural history (Scotland, the British Isles, and Scandinavia). In the fall of 1966, Nicolaisen came to Ohio State University in the United States as visiting professor of English and folklore. In 1967, he returned to the University of Edinburgh, becoming the acting head of its School of Scottish Studies in 1968. The following year, he left for the United States to take the position of associate professor in the English Department at the Binghamton University.

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