Rolf Bremmer
Rolf Hendrik Bremmer (born 13 August 1950, Zwolle) is a Dutch academic. He is professor of Old and Middle English, and extraordinary professor of Old Frisian, at Leiden University. Biography. Rolf Bremmer's father, also named Rolf Hendrik Bremmer (1917–1995), was a theologian and preacher associated with the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands (Liberated) and a student of Klaas Schilder. He married Lucie Gera Arina Lindeboom (b. 1918) in 1943 in The Hague; she was the daughter of a Reformed preacher (Cornelis Lindeboom). Rolf Jr.'s older brother J.N. Bremmer is professor of church history at the University  of Groningen. Bremmer received his master's degree in English language and literature from the University of Groningen in 1977. From 1976 to 1977 he studied at Oxford University as a Harting Student, with Anglo-Saxonists such as Bruce Mitchell, Tom Shippey, and J. M. Wallace-Hadrill. In 1986 he gained his Ph.D. from Radboud University Nijmegen, with a dissertation on a late Middle English treatise on the five senses, directed by F.N.M. Diekstra. He taught English from 1977 to 1979 at Gomarus College in Groningen, and Old and Middle English and historical linguistics at Radboud University from 1979 to  1986. Since 1986 he has been with Leiden University. In 1994 Bremmer was the Erasmus professor at Harvard for Dutch Culture and History. He is a premier Dutch authority on Frisian language and literature, occupying a special professorship in Frisian studies. Bremmer has published and edited books on a variety of topics in Old English language and literature, Middle English language and literature, and Frisian language and literature. He has published on the seventeenth-century scholar and collector Franciscus Junius, he has translated the work on "Beowulf" by Dutch Anglo-Saxon scholar P. J. Cosijn, and has lectured on J.R.R.  Tolkien. His "Introduction to Old Frisian" (2009) (a book for the beginning student), according to E.G. Stanley, is "a book for the twenty-first century...a book of essentials, from which nothing essential has been omitted." In 2009 he published a kind of alphabet book with 26 terms from the Christian lexicon, "Van Ambt tot Zonde" ("From office to sin"), illustrated by Geert de Groot, which explains the Christian connotations of such concepts as sin and foreskin; the booklet collects articles originally published in the national daily "Nederlands Dagblad". Bremmer serves on the editorial board of the journals "The Heroic  Age", "Neophilologus", and "NOWELE", and on the advisory board of the journals "Anglo-Saxon" and "Studies in Medievalism" and of the series Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library. In 2010 Bremmer delivered the Toller Lecture at the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies.