Ernst Moritz Ludwig Ettmüller

Who was Ernst Moritz Ludwig Ettmüller?

Ernst Moritz Ludwig Ettmüller, German philologist, was born at Gersdorf near Löbau, in Saxony.

He was privately educated by his father, the Protestant pastor of the village, entered the gymnasium at Zittau in 1816 and studied from 1823 to 1826 at the university of Leipzig. After a period of about two years during which he was partly abroad and partly at Gersdorf, he proceeded to Jena, where in 1830 he delivered, under the auspices of the university, a course of lectures on the old Norse poets. Three years later he was called to occupy the mastership of German language and literature at the Zürich gymnasium; and in 1863 he left the gymnasium for the university, with which he had been partially connected twenty years before. He died at Zürich in April 1877.

To the study of English Ettmüller contributed by an alliterative translation of Beowulf, an Anglo-Saxon chrestomathy entitled Engla and Seaxna scopas and boceras, and a well-known Lexicon Anglo-Saxonicum, in which the explanations and comments are given in Latin, but the words unfortunately are arranged according to their etymological affinity, and the letters according to phonetic relations.