Benedikt Benedikz

We are very grateful to Christine Penney (Librarian of the Hurd Library at Hartlebury Castle) for the following obituary, a shorter version of which appeared in The Times on 28 April 2009.

Benedikt Benedikz: librarian and Norse scholar (born in Reykjavik on 4 April 1932, died on 25 March 2009, at the age of seventy-six)

Ben Benedikz was among the last of the scholar-librarians who have done so much to safeguard and enhance the collections of rare books and archives in their care, patiently maintaining their crucial importance both to scholarship and to the reputation of their parent institutions. When his career began they were often regarded as the “ivory tower” of librarianship; when it ended they were firmly in the main stream.

Benedikt Sigurđur Benedikz was born in Reykjavik on 4 April 1932, the eldest son of the diplomat and bibliophile Eirikur Benedikz (1907—88). At the age of twelve, when his father was appointed Chargé d’Affaires to the newly established Icelandic Legation in London (retiring as Minister-Counsellor in 1978), he moved to England, which remained his home for the rest of his life. He was educated at Burford Grammar School, Pembroke College, Oxford (where he also trained as an operatic tenor), and University College London, where he took his diploma in librarianship in 1956. He was already a formidable linguist, always an asset in a librarian and often in other circumstances too. One long vacation his father sent him round the eastern Mediterranean in a tramp steamer. Obliged to spend a night ashore in Turkey, Benedikz accepted hospitality in the tiny cell of an orthodox monk, the only language they shared being Latin.

His first post was with Buckinghamshire County Library. In 1959 he was offered two positions: one in the chorus at Covent Garden and one in the University Library at Durham. He chose the latter and here he met Phyllis Laybourn, herself a librarian. They married in 1964, having spent part of their courtship cataloguing the collection of the See of Durham at Auckland Castle. There followed three years in charge of the humanities collections at the New University of Ulster, two teaching bibliography at Leeds Polytechnic and his final move, in 1973, was to the University of Birmingham, as Head of Special Collections, where he remained until his retirement in 1995.

Benedikz was equally at home in a library, lecture room or cathedral cloister. His particular forté was in the field of acquisitions. Thousands of rare books and the papers of Charles Masterman, Oliver Lodge, Oswald Mosley and the Church Mission Society came to Birmingham during his tenure. He nurtured and developed the two “star” collections — the Avon and the Chamberlain papers — maintaining excellent relations with the families who had donated them. He taught bibliography, palaeography and Old Norse, thus helping to set the library at the heart of the university, and he was consultant to the cathedral libraries of Lichfield and Worcester and the magnificent library of Bishop Hurd at Hartlebury Castle.

His scholarship was many-sided. He edited On the Novel, a Festschrift presented to Walter Allen, in 1971, and published a string of papers on Icelandic history and literature, Byzantine studies, bibliography, modern political papers and medieval manuscripts. The work which gave him most satisfaction was The Varangians of Byzantium. This book was a revision and substantial rewriting of Væringja Saga, by Sigfús Blöndal, a history of the Byzantine mercenary regiment which included Norsemen. Blöndal had died before he could revise and see it through the press and its publication in Reykjavik in 1954 attracted little attention .In 1960 Blöndal’s widow invited Benedikz to produce an English edition. It was published by Cambridge in 1978, has recently been issued in paperback and is soon to be published electronically. For this and other published work the university awarded Benedikz a doctorate in 1979. He was elected FRHistS in 1981 and FSA in 1985. In 1999 the University of Nottingham, in acknowledgment of the family’s gift of his father’s outstanding collection of Islandica, made him a member of their College of Benefactors. He became closely involved with Viking studies there and delivered the first of the biennial Fell-Benedikz lectures in 2000.

Genuine eccentrics are fast disappearing from academia but Ben Benedikz was certainly one of them. Before his arrival at Birmingham a colleague remarked of him: “Mr Benedikz always strikes me as the sort of person any self-respecting university library ought to have one of”, and, indeed, no one quite like him had been seen there before. Snatches of grand opera would waft up and down the lift shaft and imitations of Churchill enlivened the reading room. He was a familiar figure every morning in the senior common room, laden with antiquarian book catalogues, picking up on the gossip and keeping the biscuit suppliers in business.

A polymath in the tradition of Dr Johnson, whom he resembled both in build and intellect, he had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the most diverse facts. He was a walking Who’s Who of theologians, politicians and academics, alive or dead. Cataloguers rarely had to consult reference books, for he could tell them immediately the correct name of a monk at the medieval monastery at Fulda, the author of a long-forgotten Victorian children’s novel or an obscure French dramatist. Occasionally the facts would become tangled. He once memorably confused Virginia Woolf’s Orlando with the children’s classic Orlando (The Marmalade Cat), when it was clear that what he really meant was her biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog Flush. He was not always at home with the more tedious aspects of library management, but his devotion to scholarship was never in doubt. He encouraged an entire generation of students, who remember him with gratitude and affection.