Content area
Full text
with Andrew Rabin
The sudden death of Lisi Oliver has deprived Old English studies of one of its most brilliant scholars and most generous mentors. Over the course of her career, Oliver made major contributions to the study of early law in the British Isles and Western Europe and earned the admiration of scholars around the world.
Oliver did not follow a straight path to academia. While an undergraduate at Smith College, she majored in Theater and Speech; subsequently she devoted the first half of her professional life to the Opera Company of Boston, where she worked under the renowned artistic director Sarah Caldwell. As a protégée of Caldwell, Oliver earned acclaim for her translation and staging of such operas as Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, Bernd Alois Zimmerman's Die Soldaten, and Johann Strauss' Die Fledermaus. In 1988, Oliver played a leading role in organizing Making Music Together, the first joint U.S./U.S.S.R. opera festival. Directing Soviet performers in the U.S. premier of Rodion Shchedrin's Dead Souls, she found herself confronted with both cultural barriers and linguistic ones. A profile in the New York Times described the lengths to which she resorted in aTempting to explain western notions of the priesthood to a Russian singer: "[Oliver] swung her hands back and forth, as if carrying a censer, but that did not work. Ms. Oliver then laid on the floor and crossed her chest as if a body on display in a coffin. That did it. 'Da, da,' came the response.1
Despite her success in the world of opera, by the late 1980s Oliver found herself drawn to an academic career. Enrolling as a graduate student at Harvard, she immersed herself in the study of Indo-European languages and institutions. At the time, this field was experiencing a revival due to the work of Calvert Watkins, who would serve as one of Oliver's principal mentors. One can see the roots of the method later adopted by Oliver in such studies as Watkins's "Sick-Maintenance in Indo-European,"2 which compared a legal custom aTested in early medieval Ireland with allegedly cognate practices from other archaic societies. Watkins derived his approach from the earliest practitioners of comparative philology, who held that legal practices and myths could- like language-be shown to descend from a...