Artur Hazelius

Who was Artur Hazelius?

Artur Immanuel Hazelius, Swedish teacher, scholar and folklorist, founder of the Nordic Museum and the open-air museum Skansen in Stockholm.

Hazelius was born in Stockholm, son of Johan August Hazelius, an Army officer, 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, 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 the energy to publish the very conservative 1st edition of the Academy's one volume spelling dictionary in 1874. However, many of the proposals from the congress were introduced in the 6th edition of the same dictionary in 1889 and the rest in a spelling reform for Swedish schools, introduced in 1906 by the minister of education Fridtjuv Berg. Berg acknowledged that Hazelius had laid the foundation for all following spelling reforms.