VRIES, JAN PIETER MARIE LAURENS DE

(1890–1964)

Linguist. De Vries studied Dutch and German literature at the Univer sity of Amsterdam, where he was one of the founders of the Unitas Studiosorum Amstelodamensium. He wrote his doctoral thesis in 1915 on ballads of the Faeroe Islands. He also published extensively on Dutch and Scandinavian literature. His interest focused on Ger manic religion and literature. In 1926, De Vries was appointed pro fessor of Germanic languages, Gothic, Anglo-Saxon, Old German, and comparative linguistics of the Indo-Germanic languages at Leiden University. Besides an early historical study on the Vikings in the Low Countries (1923) and a book on the Germanic Period (1930, rev. ed. 1941), he wrote his famous Altgermanische Religion sgeschichte [History of Ancient Germanic Religion, 1935–1937; rev. ed. 1956–1957] and his Altnordische Literaturgeschichte [History of Ancient Nordic Literature, 1941–1942, rev. ed. 1964–1967]. His sec ond field of interest was folklore. During the German occupation of the Netherlands in 1940–1945, de Vries, who accepted an authoritarian form of government, was a firm advocate of maintaining the Dutch national identity, as opposed to those collaborators who were adherents of the German idea of a greater German Reich that would include the Dutch. After the war he was dismissed as professor on the charge of serious intellectual col laboration. Working as a teacher in a secondary school until his re tirement in 1955, de Vries studied and wrote extensively on etymol ogy and the history of religion.