"There's a sense of mission to get the message out that there are things which aren't written in German and French which are worthwhile," says Mitchell.

The professor says he hopes to focus on Swedish works in the next five or 10 years. "That would be something that hasn't been done," Mitchell says.

Obscured Roles

Mitchell is also concerned with the obscured role of women in Swedish culture. He says, "Women were frozen out of all normal modes of expression in society."

Mitchell's book Job in Female Garb: Studies on the Autobiography of Agneta Horn analyzes the seventeenth-century life story of an aristocratic Swedish woman.

The daughter of a field marshal, Horn wrote about how she was dragged through various battlesites during the Thirty Years' War and was married and widowed by the time she reached her late twenties. In his book, Mitchell makes the point that Horn's biography is actually an "unintentional novel" and "the most interesting work of Swedish literature of that century."

Professor of English and Folklore Joseph Harris says Mitchell's commentary on Horn is "a brilliant piece of literary detective work." Mitchell's insight, says Harris, showed that when Horn wrote her story, she structured it with certain Biblical passages, and in so doing unwittingly wrote the first Swedish novel.

Innovative Teaching

At Harvard, Mitchell teaches a Core course entitled "The Heroic Tradition in Northern Europe," nicknamed "Sub-zero Heroes" by students, and several undergraduate-level courses in the Departments of Scandinavian and Folklore and Mythology, where he is head tutor. Last fall, he taught a course about Strindberg and Ibsen, and in the past he has taught a course on the Scandinavian novel from 1865 to World War I.

Harris says, "Steve is remarkable for combining several different areas fruitfully. He has [also] taken on administrative work. It's not usual for a full professor to be willing to do that."

Professor of Scandinavian and Slavic Literature Albert B. Lord '34 cites an example of the "innovative way [Mitchell] approaches teaching the medieval texts." Lord says that Mitchell gives his students facsimile copies of Beowulf and encourages them to decipher the old text themselves, instead of simply examining a modern English translation.

Lord says Mitchell "is a sound scholar with great erudition, as well as a very lively and dignified presence on the platform."

One idea Mitchell has for a new Core course deals with the literary impact of witchcraft and might begin "all the way back at the golden ass." Mitchell also mentions his idea for the possibility of a "supra-national course on verbal abuse and verbal praise."

Mitchell finished his undergraduate study of anthropology, which he labels his "great original love," at the University of California at Berkeley in 1974 and went to graduate school at the University of Minnesota. It was at Berkeley, Mitchell says, that he first learned that he was fascinated by folklore and mythology.

As part of his breadth requirements there, Mitchell had to take a course in Scandinavian mythology and "fell in love with it." He was also interested in socio-linguistics and folklore and mythology as an undergraduate.

After receiving his Ph.D., Mitchell decided to travel to Sweden to study at the University of Lund, which was founded in the 1680s and is "one of the two big old research universities in Sweden."

Mitchell plans to continue his research during his sabbatical and during this summer in Sweden at the Royal Manuscript Library in Stockholm.