Ralph Warren Victor Elliott AM (born Rudolf W. H. V. Ehrenberg 14 August 1921) is a German-born Australian professor of English, and a runologist.
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Rudolf Ehrenberg was born in Berlin, Germany on 14 August 1921, the son of Kurt Phillip Rudolf Ehrenberg, an architect, and Margarete Landecker.[1] Rudolf's father was half Jewish (his father was the distinguished jurist Victor Gabriel Ehrenberg and his mother was the daughter of Rudolf von Jhering) and his mother was Jewish. The family moved to Karlsruhe in 1931, and Rudolf attended the Bismark Gymnasium there from the ages of ten to sixteen, but because of the dangers that his family were facing under the Nazi regime, Kurt Ehrenberg decided it was best for his family to leave Germany. His eldest daughter married and emigrated to the United States of America, whereas Rudolf and his younger sister, Lena, were sent to live with their uncle, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Max Born, in Edinburgh. Rudolf's parents only managed to escape to Britain two weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War.[2]
Rudolf Ehrenberg enrolled at the University of St Andrews in 1939, where he distinguished himself by gaining a medallion for General English in 1940.[3] However, later the same year he was interned and sent to an internment camp in Canada, only to be allowed to return to Britain 10 months later in order to join an Alien Pioneer Company. Rudolf Ehrenberg changed his name to Ralph Warren Victor Elliott on 12 May 1943, and after officer training at Sandhurst he was awarded the Sword of Honour (actually a medallion because or wartime shortages). With the rank of lieutenant, he was posted to the Royal Leicestershire Regiment, and then to the Manchester Regiment in April 1945. He was severely wounded in combat in the Teutoburg Forest, and nearly died before being rescued several hours later.[2]
After the end of the war, Elliott resumed his studies at St Andrews, where he graduated in 1949. He taught at St Andrews for a while, before moving to the newly-created University College of North Staffordshire, where he wrote an influential introduction to the runic script that was published in 1959.[4] He then emigrated to Australia, with his family (his wife, Margaret Robinson, and three children) and his father, where he took up a post teaching Old English and Middle English at the University of Adelaide, rising to the rank or professor. He later accepted the position of Professor of English at the Australian National University, where he remained until retirement. During this time he published books on Chaucer's English (1974) and Thomas Hardy's English (1984). He also wrote a book on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a topic that had interested him since his time at Staffordshire a quarter of a century earlier, when he wrote an essay "Sir Gawain in Staffordshire: A Detective Essay in Literary Geography" that appeared in The Times on 21 May 1958.
In 1990 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia in recognition of "service to the community and to education",[5] and in 2001 he was awarded the Centenary Medal for "service to Australian society and the humanities in the history of the English language".[6] In 2005 he published a short autobiography entitled "One Life, Two Languages".