Stig Wikander

Stig Wikander, born 27 August 1908 in Norrtälje, died 20 December 1983, was a Swedish indologist, iranologist and historian of religions. He was professor of Sanskrit and comparative Indo-European philology at Uppsala University from 1953 until his retirement in 1974. He wrote in German and Swedish. He was visiting professor at Columbia University in 1959-1960 and taught at El Colegio de México in Mexico City in 1967. Early in his career he befriended Georges Dumézil and he had an extensive correspondence with Mircea Eliade.

His research on Indo-European religion became influential and was developed further by Dumézil and others. Together with the linguist Bertil Malmberg he founded the journal Studia Linguistica in 1947. His last monograph was a book on Arab accounts of Scandinavians in the Viking Age, Araber, vikingar, väringar ("Arabs, Vikings, Varangians").

Selected works

• Der arische Männerbund : Studien zur indo-iranischen Sprach- und Religionsgeschichte, Lund, Ohlsson, 1938 (Ph.D. thesis).
• Vayu : Texte und Untersuchungen zur indo-iranischen Religionsgeschichte, t. 1. Texte, Uppsala-Leipzig, 1941.
• Gudinnan Anahita och den zoroastiska eldskulten, Uppsala, 1942.
• Feuerpriester in Kleinasien und Iran (Acta Regia Societatis humaniorum litterarum Lundensis, 40), Lund, 1946.
• "Pāṇḍavasagan och Mahābhāratas mystiska förutsättningar", Religion och Bibel 6, 1947, pp. 27-39.
• Araber, vikingar, väringar (Svenska humanistiska förbundet 90), Lund, 1978.