Kenneth Sisam
Kenneth Sisam FBA (2 September 1887 – 26 August 1971) was a New Zealand academic and publisher, whose major career was as an employee of the Oxford University Press.
Life[edit]
Born at Ōpōtiki in 1887, Sisam was the eighth and youngest child of Alfred John Sisam, a police officer and farmer, and his wife Maria Knights. He was educated at Auckland Grammar School, and entered University College, Auckland, in 1906 with a scholarship, where he graduated MA in 1910.[1]
With a Rhodes scholarship, Sisam matriculated at Merton College, Oxford, in 1910.[2] He completed a B.Litt. there under Arthur Napier in 1915, producing an edition of the Salisbury Psalter. He married that year. In this period he taught students including J. R. R. Tolkien.[3] Poor health ruled out military service, and he went to work part-time on the Oxford English Dictionary. In 1916, he published on the Beowulf manuscript.[1]
In 1917, the Sisams moved to London, where Kenneth worked as a civil servant. In 1922, he joined Oxford University Press (OUP). With his promotion to assistant secretary, they built a family house at Boars Hill. From 1922 to 1942 Sisam worked at OUP under Robert William Chapman while developing his scholarly work on Anglo-Saxon, but failing in 1925 to become Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon when Tolkien was chosen.[1] OUP successes under his stewardship include introducing 30 new titles to the Oxford World's Classics series; the creation of the Oxford Companion to English and the Oxford Latin Dictionary, and the recruitment of W. B. Yeats as editor of The Oxford Book of Modern Verse.[4]
Sisam was elected to the British Academy in 1941. Appointed OUP secretary in succession to Chapman in 1942, he became a Fellow of Merton College.[2] In 1948, he retired to the Scilly Isles but continued to produce scholarship, including The Structure of Beowulf (1965). He died in a nursing home at Lelant in Cornwall on 26 August 1971.[1]
Family[edit]
In 1915, Sisam married Naomi Irene Gibbons (1886–1958), daughter of Robert Pearce Gibbons, from Auckland. They had a son, Hugh, and a daughter, Celia (born 1926), who became a scholar of Anglo-Saxon.[1]
References[edit]
- ^ a b c d e Stray, Christopher. "Sisam, Kenneth". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/94507. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
- ^ a b Levens, R.G.C., ed. (1964). Merton College Register 1900–1964. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. p. 81.
- ^ John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), p. 34.
- ^ John M. Bowers, Tolkien's Lost Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2019), p. 56.
External links[edit]
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