By the time that Dumezil had entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1916, he was already on the road to studying linguistics and the classics. Dumezil's studies were delayed by World War I, so he graduated from the university only in 1920, specializing in Classics.
Gallery of Georges Dumézil
Dumezil received his doctorate from the University of Paris in 1924 after writing a thesis comparing the common origins of the Greek ambrosia and a similarly named Indian drink Amrita, which was said to make its imbiber immortal.
Career
Achievements
Membership
Awards
War Cross 1914-1918
Georges Dumezil was the recipient of the War Cross 1914-1918.
National Order of the Legion of Honor
Georges Dumezil was the recipient of the National Order of the Legion of Honor.
By the time that Dumezil had entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1916, he was already on the road to studying linguistics and the classics. Dumezil's studies were delayed by World War I, so he graduated from the university only in 1920, specializing in Classics.
Dumezil received his doctorate from the University of Paris in 1924 after writing a thesis comparing the common origins of the Greek ambrosia and a similarly named Indian drink Amrita, which was said to make its imbiber immortal.
Georges Dumezil was a French comparative philologist, religious studies scholar, educator and author best known for his analysis of sovereignty and power in Proto-Indo-European religion and society.
Background
Georges Dumezil was born on March 4, 1898, in Paris, France, to a well-educated family. Dumezil's father, Jean Anatole was a classicist and Georges became interested in ancient languages at a young age. His mother's name was Marguerite (Dutier) Dumezil.
Education
Having mastered Greek and Latin at an early age, Dumezil became interested in the study of Indo-European myth and religion when still at the Lycée Louis le Grand in Paris, largely via exposure to the linguist Michel Bréal (1832-1915), the grandfather of a schoolmate.
By the time that Dumezil had entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1916, he was already on the road to studying linguistics and the classics. Dumezil's studies were delayed by World War I, so he graduated from the university only in 1920, specializing in Classics, and received his doctorate from the University of Paris in 1924 after writing a thesis comparing the common origins of the Greek ambrosia and a similarly named Indian drink Amrita, which was said to make its imbiber immortal. The dissertation was controversial because some of the examiners, such as Henri Hubert, thought that Dumezil took liberty with the facts to generate a more beautiful interpretation.
Having learned Sanskrit from Bréal, he went on to study under Antoine Meillet (1866-1936), who held the chair of comparative grammar at the Collège de France. Via Meillet, Dumézil was introduced to Iranian materials and given state-of-the-art knowledge of method in Indo-European linguistics.
During his career, Dumezil became a recipient of honorary doctorates from different universities, including the University of Uppsala (1955), University of Istanbul (1964), University of Berne (1969), and Liege University (1979).
During World War I, Dumezil served as a junior officer in the French army. Only after the war, he continued his education and in 1920, after a short time as a schoolteacher in Beauvais, he took a job as a lecturer at the University of Warsaw.
In 1925 Dumezil was awarded the newly created chair of the history of religions department at the University of Istanbul, where he spent some of the happiest years of his life. In Turkey, he mastered Armenian, several Caucasian languages, and Ossetic, a western Iranian language that gave him access to traditions concerning mythic heroes known as Narts, which he treated in several monographs.
In 1931, however, Dumezil left Istanbul to lecture in French at Sweden’s University of Uppsala, and two years later he became the head of the department of comparative religion at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris.
In 1941, Dumezil was expelled from teaching because of his membership in Freemasonry. However, in 1949, he became the chair of the Indo-European civilization department at the College de France, where he taught until his retirement.
Dumezil’s work on “the new comparative mythology” was begun in the 1930s, solidified in the 1940s, and further refined at the end of his career. Pertaining to the ancient Indo-Europeans, it encompassed the religious beliefs and mythical tales of Indo-Iranians, Scandinavians, Celts, and Romans. Dumezil theorized that activity within these societies was organized into three areas or functions, in order of importance: religious sovereignty, military strength, and fertility. He found that the myths of these various peoples illustrated these three functions and their hierarchy and that Roman religion and history did as well. And in his early works, Dumezil argued that Indo-European society was also organized into three corresponding classes: priests and rulers, warriors, and producers. He later, however, modified this conclusion.
Much of Dumezil’s seminal work on “the new comparative mythology” was published from 1938 to 1948, but he continued to refine his ideas into the 1980s.
After Dumézil had retired from teaching in 1968, however, for three years he continued to lecture in the United States at Princeton, Chicago and Los Angeles. He also continued a vigorous program of research until his death in 1986, continually adducing new examples of tripartition and refining his earlier interpretations. He died of a cerebral haemorrhage at age eighty-eight in 1986.
Although he tried to disassociate himself from friends who were involved in extreme right-wing politics during the 1930s and 1940s, Dumezil never explicitly denounced fascist ideology but rather avoided comment. In 1986 Bruce Lincoln noted in the Times Literary Supplement “for one who values memory so highly, Dumezil is peculiarly amnesiac concerning these matters.”
Views
In developing his theories, Dumezil’s influences included Emile Durkheim—-who linked belief systems to a social fact—his teacher linguist Antoine Meillet, and Chinese specialist Michel Granet. Dumezil’s ideas differ from those of structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in that he does not assert that they can be applied universally, but rather only to Indo-European cultures.
His views, however, were changing. First, he abandoned Frazer and his tendency to view myth as the residue of older ritual practices. Second, he acknowledged the linguistic weakness of the comparisons he had championed and assigned now distinctly subordinate importance to linguistic evidence and methods. Third, under Granet's influence, he began to stress the importance of structure—understood as the way focal categories were identified and organized in a coherent system—that might manifest itself in any number of contexts under widely varying terminologies.
Some scholars have found great fault with Dumézil’s style of comparative mythology, suggesting that he has created an artificial system by addressing only the mythological and historical evidence that supports his thesis. His functions have been criticized as vague, and because the activities are common to most societies, some believe they do not support the idea of a distinctly Indo-European functional mythology. Other critics still question Dumezil’s philosophical and political leanings.
Membership
In 1958, Georges Dumezil became an associate member of the Royal Academy of Sciences, Arts and Fine Arts of Belgium, and in 1968 - a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of Vienna. In 1970, he was elected as a member of the Academy of inscriptions and belles-lettres of Paris, and in 1974, he became an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy. At last, he was elected to the French Academy on October 26, 1978.
Personality
Georges Dumezil was multilingual; besides French, he learned, at each of his travels, thirty languages (at least he was able to "handle", that is to say, to read).
Quotes from others about the person
“More than any other individual, he has helped to rescue two important fields of study from the discredit into which they had fallen: comparative mythology, which had become a laughing stock towards the end of the nineteenth century, and Indo-European studies, which were deeply tainted by Nazi racism.” - Bruce Lincoln
Connections
Dumezil was married to Madeleine Legrand in 1925. The couple gave birth to two children: Anne Perrine and Claude.