Jaan Puhvel: A Remembrance by Robert L. Fisher
On April 25th, 2026, at his home in Encino, California, surrounded by his wife and sons, Jaan Puhvel died at the age of 94. We have lost a philological genius, a lexicographer of the Hittite language, and a prolific scholar. We have also lost a strong advocate and defender of Estonian freedom, an excellent administrator (though he always preferred his studies), and a well-rounded humanist who was very knowledgeable of literature, especially French literature, and Classical civilization. A typical letter from him was peppered with quotes in Latin and Greek from the Classics, and often, in French, references to the letters of Madame de Sévigné and phrases from Voltaire. His letters showed his cosmopolitan formation and his mastery of several languages, all written in a beautiful penmanship that was steady and clear to the last year of his life.
Born on January 24, 1932, in Tallinn, Estonia, he and his family were forced to flee just twelve years later from German occupation and impending Soviet invasion, in 1944, to Finland. His father, Karl Puhvel, a civil engineer and land surveyor who worked at a government ministry, managed to acquire exit visas for himself and the family, under the guise of being Ingrians, who were allowed to leave Estonia. They boarded a seized Russian vessel, the Aunus, and crossed to Finland safely.
After a time in Finland, the family emigrated to Sweden, where young Jaan learned Swedish so perfectly that he passed the national exams in 1949 with the highest honours. That same year the family settled in Montreal, Canada, where Puhvel entered McGill University and earned a BA with a double major in French and Latin in 1950. One year later he received an MA in Linguistics, earning the Governor General’s gold medal. Following graduation, Puhvel began a doctoral program in Classics and Indo-European Linguistics at Harvard University. During his program, in 1953, Puhvel received a stipend which allowed him to spend six months at the Sorbonne in Paris and another six months in Upsala, Sweden. It was in Paris that he studied with Goerges Dumézil, whose work on comparative Indo-European mythology, was to have a deep influence on Puhvel’s development as a scholar. Puhvel’s book, Comparative Mythology (1987), written in his flowing and entertaining style that combined erudition with colloquialisms, was translated into several languages and used as a textbook in many universities. In addition to Dumézil, Puhvel also studied with the Iranianist Émile Benveniste, Pierre Chantraine (author of a Greek etymological dictionary), Michel Lejeune (expert on Mycenean and Gaulish), and Alfred Ernout, who compiled with Antoine Meillet an etymological dictionary of Latin. In Upsala, Puhvel studied with Stig Wikander, whose works on Indo-Iranian religion influenced Dumézil.
Puhvel taught in the Classics Department at McGill (1955-56), then at the University of Texas, Austin (1957-58), and finally at UCLA from 1958 to his retirement in 1992.
Puhvel never lost his affection for Estonia, its language and culture. Beginning in 1993, Puhvel taught many summers at the University of Tartu in a newly liberated Estonia. In the 1990s, Puhvel was able to reclaim the family farm in Aegviidu, which he restored and where he and his family members spend their summers.
Puhvel’s lasting legacy to scholarship is his Etymological Dictionary of Hittite (1984 – 2021). His desire was to create a highly accurate and complete dictionary that would be useful for scholars for generations to come (although he was well aware he would not live long enough to finish this project). This is a monumental work in eleven volumes. A typical entry begins by presenting the base form from which are derived various nouns, adjectives, adverbs and verbs. Examples of every case of the nouns are given, with their attestation in the published cuneiform texts. The variant spellings of the words are given: cuneiform, Akkadograms and Sumerograms. Included are phrases in which the words appear, often with references to articles and books that discuss the word in question. At the end of the entry is a postulated Indo-European root with its etyma in various languages, often Greek, but also Indic, Iranian, Germanic, Slavic and Baltic. Some word entries contain several pages of attestations. These pages must have consumed hours of constant labour to look up the text, find the word, and accurately transcribe it. It must have required enormous patience. I am reminded of Dr Johnson’s definition in his own dictionary of a lexicographer: “a harmless drudge that busies himself in tracing the original”. Contemporary and future scholars owe a great debt to Puhvel for his selfless devotion to this Hittite dictionary.
Puhvel believed that Indo-European Studies should encompass not only historical/comparative linguistics, but also archeology and mythology. Competence in all three areas was required for the doctoral degree. In fact, Puhvel with professor Wayland Hand, founded the Center for the Study of Folklore and Mythology. Puhvel saw himself as primarily a philologist rather than as a linguist. He thought that the application of the comparative method was essential for reconstructing earlier stages of ancient languages, but he also understood that the interpretation of ancient texts required applying the principles of philology which included understanding the culture (especially religion) and the origin and nature of the physical artefacts of the culture (archeology). The combination of these principles can produce from ancient texts the best results in understanding their meaning.
Puhvel worked with scholars in related fields, such as the anthropologist C. Scott Littleton, who wrote The New Comparative Mythology: An Anthropological Assessment of the Theories of Georges Dumézil (1973), and folklorist Donald J. Ward, the author of The Divine Twins: An Indo-European Myth in Germanic Tradition (1968). Puhvel attracted to the Indo-European Section a number of visiting professors who were famous in their fields, for example Jacques Duchesne-Guillemin (Iranian), Caeryn Williams (Medieval Welsh and tutor to Charles, the then-Prince of Wales), Wolfgang Meid (Celtic), and Werner Winter (Tokharian). A very prominent scholar of Indo-European, Calvert Watkins, who taught at UCLA from 2003 till his death in 2013, was an old friend of Puhvel’s from their days as graduate students at Harvard. Watkins and some other Hittitologists met regularly at Puhvel’s house for discussions on Anatolian languages.
As Puhvel worked on his dictionary, he used his findings to write a rich series of articles that expanded the etymologies of Hittite words, but also articles on expressions in Latin and Greek that could be elucidated by Hittite. These many articles have been collected in Epilecta Indoeuropaea (covering 1978 – 2001) and Ultima Indoeuropaea (covering 2002 – 2011). From the latter publication we have a typical sample of Puhvel’s prose: “An encore to an epilogue can fairly test any reader’s indulgence. Nor is another assemblage necessarily the best repository for a septuagenarian’s ruminations or fits of esprit d’escalier (from the Preface). Of the 58 articles in the former volume, is an article on an Anatolian turn of phrase in the Iliad (Puhvel thought the Trojans were probably Anatolians), embedded Anatolianisms in Greek epic, as well as articles on ivory and ebony (later he wrote about elephant and element in Latin), isoglosses between Baltic and Hittite, the widespread word for soap (including in Germanic), and many others that are fascinating insights into the connections between these ancient languages and peoples.
Over the decades Puhvel had amassed thirteen thousand books and periodicals on Estonian and Baltic culture, society, politics and economy, including some rare books from the eighteenth century. Not long before his death, he had donated his library to Stanford University’s Estonian and Baltic collection.
The world is a poorer place without Jaan Puhvel. We miss his encyclopedic knowledge of Indo-European languages, his easy-going sense of humour, his dedication to promoting Indo-European Studies and preserving and enriching the culture of Estonia and the other Baltic nations. We miss his humane sensitivity. We treasure the scholarship he has left us, especially his monumental Hittite dictionary that generations of scholars will build upon. I will miss his laughter and the letters he sent me over the decades that had me consulting any number of dictionaries. I was in awe of him.
Robert L. Fisher, PhD
Indo-European Studies (1973)