Paul Egede

Paul Egede (Norwegian:Poul Hansen Egede) (September 9, 1708 – June 6, 1789) was a Danish-Norwegian theologian, missionary to Greenland and scholar of the Greenlandic language.[1]

Egede was born in Kabelvåg, a village in Vågan municipality on the southern shore of Austvågøy island, one of the Lofoten island group in the county of Nordland, northern Norway. He was the eldest of two sons born to Norwegian missionary Hans Egede and his wife Gertrud Rask. In 1721, the Egede family, consisting of his parents and his three siblings, relocated from Norway to Greenland. His father had been sent by the Danish government to seek the old Norse colony on Greenland. The last communication with that colony had been over 300 years earlier. No Norse survivors were found. However, he did find the Inuit and started a mission among them.[2]

Paul Egede assisted his father in the Greenland mission. After 15 years in Greenland, Hans Egede returned to Denmark in 1736. Paul Egede remained for an additional six years and succeeded his father as superintendent of the Greenland mission. Paul Egede's knowledge of Greenland's society, culture and language assured the success of the mission.[3]

In 1742 Paul Egede was appointed Minister of the Vartov Lutheran Church in Copenhagen. In 1747, Egede became professor of theology in the Greenland Mission Seminary, in 1758 becoming its Provost. In 1779 he earned the additional title and rank of Bishop of Greenland and in 1785 he was made a fellow of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters.[4]

Egede also translated the New Testament into Greenlandic, a language related to the Inuktitut of northern Canada but not to any Scandinavian language. In this task, he was assisted by his translator Arnarsaq. He published a Greenlandic-Danish-Latin dictionary (1750), Greenlandic grammar (1760) and Greenlandic catechism (1756). He wrote a number of books relating to the Eskimo–Aleut languages spoken by the natives of Greenland. Egede died in Copenhagen in 1789, now a respected expert on Greenland and its people, having published that year a journal of his life in Greenland.[5]

References

  1. ^ Egede, Poul Hansen, 1708-1789, John Carter Brown Library.
  2. ^ Hans Egede. Explorer, Colonizer, Missionary Gospel Fellowship, Greenville, South Carolina. Retrieved 2010-01-20.
  3. ^ "Egede, Povel Hansen (1708-1789)", Mineralogical Record, 2009. Retrieved 2010-01-20.
  4. ^ The Lutheran Cyclopedia by Henry Eyster Jacobs, John Augustus William Haas (Scribner, 1899).
  5. ^ "Hans Poulsen Egede", Mineralogical Record.

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This article incorporates text from the public domain 1907 edition of The Nuttall Encyclopædia.