Lars Wollin, Emeritus Professor of Scandinavian Languages/Swedish, late of Åbo Akademi University, Finland, previously at the universities of Lund, Gothenburg and Uppsala. Resident in Uppsala.

My principal fields of interest are translation studies and the history of language, in both cases applied to Scandinavian and Swedish themes, includimg the interplay of structure and function of written language in different historical periods and literary genres. A key focus has always been the role played by Latin in most stages of the historical development of Swedish. My doctoral dissertation in 1981 dealt with translation from Latin at the late medieval abbey of Vadstena and was based on a model of my own making, designed for the grammatical analysis of the translation process.

Since then, I have chiefly undertaken research in four, partly overlapping, areas:

• The role of translation in the history of the Scandinavian languages (mainly Swedish): in the epic poetry of medieval chivalry and in Bridgettine mysticism and monastic edification; in ancient and Icelandic patriotic narration during the Caroline epoch (the late 17th and early 18th centuries); and in 19th- and 20th-century novels – from classics and Nobel Prize winners to mass-produced popular literature.
• Scandinavian and Swedish medieval philology: the linguistic character and mutual relations of Old Swedish (in some cases Old Norse and Latin) textual sources.
• The history of Swedish philology and linguistics: the first grammars of Swedish and the first descriptions of dialects in the 17th and 18th centuries; the early development of Scandinavian philology as an academic discipline in Sweden.
• The Danish and Swedish Reformers’ translation of the Holy Bible into the contemporary vernaculars, carried out in the second quarter of the 16th century.

The fourth area has dominated my research-work since 2015. The monograph The humanist Bible Project. Translating the Scriptures in the Scandinavian Reformation appeared in 2024 (in Swedish, with an English Summary).