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Born 11 February 1910 into the family of a London lawyer's clerk, Arthur Thomas Hatto had a formative opening of the mind at a young age: removed during the First World War to the safety of a small village in the Sussex countryside where he could 'run wild', as he said, he experienced an awakened sensibility for nature that he afterward acknowledged as the wellspring of his life's work, the search for authentic echoes of the archaic mind in poetry. The plentiful and highly-regarded fruits of his career in medieval German language and literature amply hint at the results; but his surviving colleagues in that field may well look back now and feel they 'knew him when', for it is from the global, comparative vantage point which he developed over many years, especially in his retirement, that one can fully take in the scope and impact of Arthur Hatto's intellectual passions.
Studying German in King's College London (where in 1971 he was made a Fellow), Arthur Hatto was awarded his B .A. in 193 1 . The MA. with Distinction (also from London) came in 1934 for his edition of a pre-Lutheran translation of the Apocalypse. His early achievements as a Germanist included an acute application of phoneme theory to Old High German (London Medieval Studies 1937). By the late 1930s he had made contact with Inner Asian materials that sparked a lifelong interest: these were first of all Yakut folk narratives that he analyzed for inclusion in a seminar at University College London, led by his tutor Frederick Norman, on the comparative study of brother-sister folktales. In 1934 Arthur Hatto accepted the position of Assistant Lecturer in German, King's College London, at the bottom of a ladder that, after an interruption necessitated by service to his country at Bletchley Park in the Second World War, led to his appointments as Reader (1946, by then at Queen Mary College, where he became a Governor [1968-70] and an Honorary Fellow from 1992) and Professor (1953). A visiting professorship brought him to the University of Auckland in 1965, and he traveled throughout his life, but London and its University were his permanent homes. The main continuities in his academic career were his position as Head of the...