Ludwig Christian Stern

Ludwig Christian Stern was born on August 12th, 1846 in Hildesheim, Germany. After finishing his school, a Gymnasium, equivalent of a Grammar school at the time, he studies at the University of Göttingen. During his studies he turned more and more to Middle Eastern languages and he solved an academic kind of "$64,000 question" on the formation of the plurals in Arabic and Ethiopian languages. He then attended to Egyptology and continued his studies in Berlin.
In 1872, he accepted an invitation to a scientific/academic journey through Upper Egypt, after which he became a librarian in the Viceroy's Library of Kairo. In 1874, he got a call to the Egyptologist Department of the Royal Museum in Berlin. Further academic travels led him to London, Italy, Egypt and Paris. From 1886 he was employed in the Manuscripts Department of the Royal Library and in 1905 he was promoted to become the director of that department.
During this period, in 1897, he started editing the Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie and was co-editor of this periodical - together with Kuno Meyer - until 1910.

In the late 1880ies, he increasingly focussed on matters of Celtic Studies, espacially the so called Ossianic Controversy and the Finn Saga. Within a short period of time, he acquired profounf knowledge of the Celtic languages and literatures.

Ludwig Christian Stern never attained the rank of a Professor, which indubitably he would have deserved. Celtic Studies profited from numerous articles he contributed to the periodicals. Among his most important publications even today are the edition of the poems of Dafydd ap Gwilym (1908), as well as the critical edition of the Modern Irish poem Cúirt an Mheadóin Oidhche. Moreover, he also published various invaluable works in his orginial academic field, Egyptology, a Hieroglyphic Glossary (1875) and a Coptic Grammar (1880), amongst others.

Ludwig Christian Stern died on October 9th, 1911.

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