Walter Arthur Alexander Anderson was a German ethnologist.
Background
Anderson was born from a Baltic German family in Minsk (now in Belarus), but in 1894 moved to Kazan (Russia), where his father, Nikolai Anderson (1845–1905), had been appointed as professor for Finno-Ugric languages at the University of Kazan.
Career
While living in Estonia in 1939, Anderson, like the majority of Baltic Germans living there, was resettled to Germany. In 1962 he died after having been involved in a traffic accident. In 1904, Anderson enrolled at the University of Kazan and from 1909 continued his studies in Saint St. Petersburg, where he received a Magister degree from the University of Saint St. Petersburg in 1911.
In 1916 he submitted his thesis on the ballad of the Emperor and the Abbot for which he received a Doctorate from the University of Kazan in 1918.
He worked at the University of Tartu in Estonia between 1920 and 1939, where in 1920 he was made the first holder of a chair of folklore. Anderson"s most significant students at the time were Oskar Loorits and August Annist and later Isidor Levin.
From 1940 to 1945 he worked at the University of Königsberg. After the end of the second world war he received a visiting professorship at the University of Kiel, which he held until his retirement.
A notable student he mentored at Kiel was West. F. H. Nicolaisen who had a distinguished career in folklore studies in the United States and Scotland.
In 1950 Anderson was invited to the United States to take part in a meeting of the International Folk Music Council held in Bloomington, Indiana, after which he stayed at Indiana University Bloomington for a few months as a visiting scholar. He retired in 1953 but remained affiliated with the University of Kiel as emeritus professor until his death.
Membership
Prussian Academy of Sciences]
From 1920 he was a member of the Learned Estonian Society (Gelehrte Estnische Gesellschaft), Estonia"s oldest scholarly organization, from 1928 to 1929 he was the president of the society, and in 1930 he, like his father Nikolai Anderson before him, was made an honorary member of the society. In 1936 Anderson became a corresponding member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences.