Sad News Last Week: The Passing of Stephen Tranter

From the ISAS list, Winfrid Rudolf reported:

I am sorry to have to report the passing away of my teacher and good friend Stephen Tranter, who died quietly in Trier (Germany) on October 12th after almost nine years of being in a coma. I am not sure whether Stephen's wife Doris has contacted you already, but I am sure she would give her ok to have the sad news spread via ISASnet. Stephen will be known to many colleagues in the field from his work on the sagas and metrical tracts. A product of ASNAC and student of Ray Page and Peter Clemoes, he later studied with Heinz Klingenberg and Hildegard Tristram at Freiburg University. He was a charismatic teacher of Old English, Old Norse and Irish, a keen musician and glorious supporter of Derby County FC. He has more than revived English Medieval Studies at Jena University when he took the refounded professorship in 1996, after an eclipse of this post for 38 years, caused by GDR university politics. He was very much aware of the tradition of English Medieval Studies at Jena (Ettmüller, Sievers, Kluge, Schücking etc.) and was striving for a holistic and colourful way of teaching our subject to students of a mainly atheist background. Thanks to his work, Jena can now pride itself in having a good library of Old and Middle English scholarship again, and a prospering community of graduate students in our field. Stephen has taught me the basic skills of our craft in a very dialogical and open way, and has been a steady companion in my thoughts for the last nine years. It is hard to describe how much he is responsible for what I have become, both as a scholar and human being. He was a lovely man, and I am sure his memory will live on in every good hour of teaching our subject and every bit of humour we gain from working together as Anglo-Saxonists.