George T. Flom


George Tobias Flom was an American professor of linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and author of numerous reference books.

Background

George Tobias Flom was born Jorgen Tobias Flom in Utica, Dane County, Wisconsin to Ole Olsen Flom and Martha Jonsdatter Flom. His grandfather had immigrated to the U.S. from Aurland Municipality in Sogn og Fjordane county, Norway, at the beginning of the 1840s. Flom studied at the University of Wisconsin in Madison from 1889 to 1893, received his master's degree from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee in 1894, and studied in Copenhagen and Leipzig from 1898 to 1899. He received his doctorate from Columbia University in 1900 for a thesis on the Nordic influence on the Scots language.
He married Loretta Regina Muldoon in 1899 and together they were parents of three children: George Reginald Flom, Elizabeth Edda Flom and Mary Antionette Flom, all of whom were born in Iowa City.

Career

Flom was a professor of Scandinavian languages and literature at the University of Iowa and at the University of Illinois, hired by then-head of the German Department, Julius Goebel Sr. In 1911 he was an organizer of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study and served as editor of that society's journal. He was also an associate editor and managing editor of the Journal of English and Germanic Philology. He was a linguist and a member of the American Philological Society. In 1936, he was the president of the Linguistic Society of America. His areas of expertise included Scandinavian paleography and philology, Norse literature and comparative linguistics relating to English, German and the Scandinavian languages. and, along with historian and Old Norse translator Laurence M. Larson, Flom established the Scandinavian studies program at Illinois, and his influence was extensive. He supervised the doctoral dissertations of, among others, Ingebrigt Lillehei, future University of Washington Scandinavian studies department chair and August Strindberg scholar Walter Gilbert Johnson as well as the noted Harvard University linguist Einar Haugen.
As an author, articles by Flom frequently appears in the literary magazine Symra. Flom was the author of A History of Norwegian Immigration to the United States: From the Earliest Beginning Down to the Year 1848. In this 1909 study, Flom laid out the establishment of early Norwegian immigrant settlement in North America starts with the settlement of Orange County, New York by Norwegian immigrants, known as "Sloopers." The study follows the journey of Norwegian immigrants as they settled in communities principally located in Illinois, Wisconsin and Iowa. He was also one of the earliest scholars to undertake a thorough investigation of the controversial Kensington Stone of Solem, Minnesota, publishing his findings twelve years after its discovery.
Flom was a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and he was knighted by 1 Class of the Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav in 1939. The George T. Flom Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign contains the former personal library of Flom. It consisted largely of collections of Danish, Swedish, Old Norse, Icelandic, Faroese, and Norwegian language, literature, and culture. A so-called festschrift in Flom's honor came out in Urbana entitled Scandinavian Studies Presented to George T. Flom by Colleagues and Friends in 1942.

Selected bibliography