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Robert David Stevick

1928 - 2018

BORN

1928

DIED

2018

About

University of Tulsa University of Washington University of Wisconsin

Robert Stevick Obituary

Robert David Stevick

Robert David Stevick, whose research into early Irish and English manuscripts advanced the understanding of arts and literature more than a millennium old, died September 27, 2018 at the age of 90.

He taught Old and Middle English to graduate and undergraduate students at the University of Washington for more than 35 years, working full-time until he was 70 and part-time until he was 75. As a professor emeritus, he continued to publish papers and present his latest research at Medieval conferences until shortly before his death from cancer.

Stevick was born January 17, 1928 in Iowa City, Iowa. As a child growing up in the Great Depression in Joplin, Missouri, he learned lessons of pragmatism, hard work and humility that would serve him well for the rest of his life.

He learned to fly at the age of 16 and entered junior college two years later with a second-hand trombone and dreams of someday making it as a musician. It was a Shakespeare class at the University of Tulsa that changed everything. His focus became the history of the English language, linguistics, Anglo Saxon verse, and the geometry of illuminated manuscripts.

Stevick in 1950 earned a scholarship for doctorate studies at the University of Wisconsin. Uncle Sam had other plans. Stevick served in the U.S. Army for two years during the Korean War, spending 18 months overseas in Japan and Korea.

Glorene Fraser, a bright young woman he'd met in graduate classes, followed him across the Pacific Ocean. She took a civilian job at a military library in Tokyo and wrote to him often. They were married in Japan April 25, 1952. He was 24; she, 22. They celebrated their 66th wedding anniversary earlier this year.

Stevick returned to the University of Wisconsin to earn his doctorate after his military service. Before he was hired at the University of Washington in 1962, he worked at Fresno State College and the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica. In 1968, thanks to a Fulbright grant, he spent a year at Sydney University in Australia. He also served as chairman of the English department at the University of Washington for a stint in the 1970s. He wrote text books and other subject-specific books, and contributed often to scholarly journals.

As a dad, he shared stories of Beowulf by candle light at the dinner table, spun tales of knights and mythical creatures, cited Shakespeare sonnets and encouraged word play. He was an excellent cook, baking his own bread, making his own jams and jellies and perfecting Japanese stir fries. He spent countless hours in his study with a compass and straight-edge seeking to unlock the mathematical principles behind early manuscript design and Anglo-Saxon narrative form.

Stevick is survived by his wife, Glorene; his daughter, Lisa Carlson of Moscow, Idaho; son, Eric Stevick of Marysville; their spouses, four grandchildren and one great grandchild.

He appreciated the compassion and understanding of hospice in the last months of his life. He chose not to have a memorial service, but certainly wouldn't object to remembrances being made to programs supporting libraries. Sign his online

Guest Book at www.Legacy.com

To plant trees in memory, please visit the Sympathy Store.

Published by The Seattle Times on Oct. 7, 2018.

Memories and Condolences
for Robert Stevick

Sponsored by The Family.

18 Entries

September 12, 2019

Of all my professors, Prof. Stevick stood out as the best teacher and the finest of men. I came to know him first in my freshman year at the University of Washington in 1962, and we wrote occasionally over the years. I was fortunate to have known him and been in his class. I have never forgotten his influence.
--Marilyn Schuster Rowan

Justin Jacobs

February 27, 2019

I first met Prof. Stevick as in the spring of 2000. I took his combined 10-credit accelerated course on the history and linguistic analysis of the English language, which was a new experimental course at the time. Prof. Stevick was already retired at the time, but chose to keep teaching part time because he enjoyed being in the classroom and interacting with students so much. His class opened my mind to a whole new way of seeing the English language and the history of languages, lessons that I continue to incorporate into my own teaching of the history of East Asian languages today. Prof. Stevick was the consummate academic: there was no doubt that he knew everything there was to know on any given subject, but he was so humble and understated about it. I loved the rich formality of our interactions: he was always impeccably dressed in a suit and tie, and he insisted on calling everyone in the class as Ms. or Mr. followed by their surname. Once a student commented on this habit of his, and whether or not it would be okay for us to call him Bob, as many other younger professors encouraged us to do. I still remember his response, delivered in that dry deadpan humor of his: Maybe when you've gotten your Ph.D. (He was true to his word: years later when I did get my Ph.D., his first e-mail to me afterwards was signed, simply, Bob. I told him that I could never bring myself to call him Bob.) My other memory from that class is the Seattle earthquake of 2000. It occurred while we were in Prof. Stevick's class, and I recall his calm and typically understated response just before he crawled under the desk at the front of the room: Oh boy.

I enjoyed Prof. Stevick's class so much that the next year I decided to enroll in his graduate course on Old English. The material was among the hardest I had ever encountered, but he always made me feel like it was within my reach. I still recall on the day of our first midterm exam, he brought in chocolate candy or something of that sort, telling us it was from his wife as encouragement on exam day. He had more of those great lines that were so understated at the time, but always stuck in my mind years later as the height of subtle truths, about things rooted in the lessons of Old English but with implications far beyond Old English. My favorite was this one: The -es declension always represents the masculine singular genitiveexcept when it doesn't. And runner-up, about the artificiality of punctuation and how Anglo-Saxon scribes got by without it: My mother never did teach me how to pronounce a comma. And in third place, when asked if he would be able to converse with Anglo-Saxons if he could somehow be transported back in time: No, my parents didn't speak Old English to me when I was growing up. Other lines were memorable for their utter lack of humor. After that terrifying midterm, when I was certain I was going to get an F, I asked him not to laugh while grading my exam. His response was instantaneous, and delivered in a grave tone: I never laugh while grading exams. Now a professor myself, and often seeing other professors posting and mocking student exams and papers in social media, this line conjures up a professional respect for the teacher-student relationship that I sometimes fear belongs a bygone era.

In my senior year, a group of three or four of us asked Prof. Stevick if he would be willing to continue to oversee our independent study of Old English poetry. He readily assented, and thus continued two more quarters of weekly meetings. It was evident that he enjoyed these meetings greatly, as did we. Prof. Stevick's classes and meetings were the highlight of my undergraduate career as an English major. Even though I was then gravitating toward the study of Chinese language and history, I continued to seek out his advice and counsel. Once, on an impulse, I told him that I was going to give up my study of Chinese and pursue graduate study in medieval languages and literature. He told me he thought that was a bad idea, and that I should continue with Chinese. He was right, and it turned out to be some of the best advice I ever received. So I went to study Chinese in Taiwan, and copied out the first several stanzas of Beowulf in Chinese translation that I found in a library book and mailed it to him. He wrote back to me, telling me that he had passed along my transcription to a grad student of his who was studying various translations of Beowulf. As the years wore on, we continued to meet for coffee occasionally, either at the Burke Museum Café or a Starbucks in Bellevue. He always told me, with great excitement, about his latest work on graphotactics and the geometrical inner workings of old Irish book illustrations. I really wanted to reciprocate his enthusiasm and understand what he was talking about, but it was way over my head. Conversely, when I shared with him my newly published articles, and later book, he always read them in full and offered his impressions on my writing style, even though the content was far outside his field of study.

I will miss knowing that Prof. Stevick is in this world, and I will miss being able to think that he would gladly make time for a cup of coffee with me the next time I pass through Seattle. He embodied the best of academia, and the best of the teacher-student relationship. The last time I saw him was in July 2016, when we met for coffee in Bellevue. Though he looked smaller and more frail than I remembered him, he fully retained his sharp wit and mind. He asked the barista for a ceramic cup for his coffee, and to me expressed astonishment that he had lived to be 88 years old. We conversed about Beowulf and Chinese for over an hour. Because he had taken the bus to meet me, I drove him several blocks away to meet his wife at the hospital afterwards. Nearly two decades after he first taught me to look at language in an entirely new light, Prof. Stevick was sitting in the passenger seat of my car. I remember thinking how good it felt to be able to return a favorany favorto the professor who had given me so much for so many years, even if it was just a brief ride through downtown Bellevue. My last communication with him was just over a year ago. He apologized for his belated response to my e-mail, informing me that he had just had a preliminary excursion to the Valley of the Shadow of You-know-What a month ago. Even when facing the end, he was still a gentleman, and still had that deadpan sense of humor. And he still cared about writing, telling me that the prose in the article I had shared with him was the best thing about the piece: clear, straight, clean. Keep it up.

Indeed, I will.

Marc Hudson

December 20, 2018

Robert Stevick was a dear man, and my mentor and dissertation advisor from 1980 until I submitted my dissertation (a translation of Beowulf and a commentary on the craft of translation) in the spring of 1983. I first met him in the spring, I believe, of 1979, when I studied with him in his Beowulf course. From the beginning,I was enthralled by both the poem and the professor's teaching. Unlike Tolkien, he did not begin his class with a dramatic, "Hwaet!" He simply entered the class with his dog-eared Klaeber edition of Beowulf and his deep erudition, and quietly took his seat at the desk in front of the class. This seemed to me ceremonial. Usually he would read a passage of the assigned swatch of lines for the day and we would move from a consideration of grammar and diction to a contemplation of the music and style of the poem and then to larger questions of of theme and character. There was a wonderful openness to this inquiry: we were encouraged to ponder the poem without "an irritable reaching after fact or conclusion," to savor, I think, the poem's richness and mystery. I never remember him consulting any notes: it was the text we were invited to ponder, and it was very evident to all of us that it was a poem of great artistry and wisdom. So it was I later proposed to write a translation of Beowulf and a commentary on the craft of translating it as my doctoral dissertation. Bob agreed to be my advisor. For much of the time I worked on the translation I was living in Iceland with my wife, Helen, who was writing her own dissertation on Grettir's Saga on a Fulbright at the Haskoli Islands. Bob was a generous, encouraging correspondent during that year, an always kindly mentor. Both my wife, Dr. Helen Mundy Hudson, and I remember him with great affection and admiration. An ideal professor, a great human being and scholar.

Stephen Sumida

December 13, 2018

Dear Glorene, Lisa, Eric and Your Families--You may know why I asked Professor Stevick to supervise my dissertation on the literature of Hawai'i, completed in 1982. After the last time I talked with him, 29 July 2018, by phone, a message I emailed him ended with a reminiscence of how in our Beowulf seminar we examined the Japanese sword that, when he squinted along its length angled under the light, he saw "hamora lafe," the remnants or marks of the hammer, just as swords are sometimes described in Beowulf. He said nothing. He smiled that restrained smile of his, without showing his teeth. From then on I trusted him to ask if he'd help me with a dissertation seemingly outside his expertise. He accepted my request, he said in part, because while teaching at the University of the West Indies and later in Sydney, he watched, listened, and read as local and indigenous literatures were emerging. And now he felt the time and opportunity had come for him to get involved in one such literature and its study--so newly called "Asian American literature" that as yet the writings of peoples of Hawai'i weren't even called "literature." I tell this story to acknowledge Professor
Stevick's quiet role in developing what is now a recognized category of American literary studies, Asian/Pacific American literature. I have always considered him a magnanimous man. Please accept condolences from me and my wife. You know how far beyond our academic work Bob Stevick helped me through tough times. Though sad to learn of his passing, I say again to him, "Wes thu, Hrothgar, hal!"--Steve Sumida

December 13, 2018

I still have his mimeographed handouts for Old English I. I remember he said the usual grammar books were inadequate. I was one of two undergraduates in his infamous Graduate "flunk" course where PhDs were eliminated. I was very proud of my B. He also told me not to take his undergraduate survey on Medieval Literature; he said I would be bored. A scholar and very kind teacher. Dr. Gerald L.Jones

Betty Feetham

October 17, 2018

I was "Mr." Stevick's secretary when he became chairman of the UW English Department, following Robert Heilman. (He called me Mrs. Feetham.) Office decorum was much different then (early 1970's).

We had a great working relationship, however. Since I was a doctoral student in the department, I had all my coursework completed by then. However, he asked me to take the required Old English (in which he had given me an "A") again; he also wanted to have me in his Beowulf seminar, which I attempted, but it was too much for someone working full-time with a family.

I was always interested in the fact that he was a musician (trombone in the Arkansas symphony, I think); at the time, I was in the choir at St. Mark's Cathedral in Seattle, and had played the violin since I was seven years old. I also was interested in his West Indies experiences; my grandfather lived in Fresno, so that was another connection.

Later, I was promoted to positions in some other offices, coming back to English as the administrator for ten years. After that I was an Associate Dean in the Graduate School (with 18 months as Acting Dean), retiring in 2008. I cherished the fact that whenever I would see him during this time (which was not frequently), he told me to call him "Bob."

He was quiet and unassuming, but he was at giant in his field.

He will be missed.

Lisa Laufer

October 17, 2018

I was saddened to hear of the passing of Robert. His intellectual achievements and healthy lifestyle have been an inspiration to me. My thoughts are prayers are with his family and friends. I'm so sorry for your loss.

Susan Howlett

October 16, 2018

I never met Prof. Stevick, but once in the late 70s, I overheard some UW students at a bar, pontificating about who wrote Beowulf. I interjected that my brother had recently proven that it was Athelstan, and they scoffed. I heard them mention Prof. Stevick's name, so I called him the next day, and when I introduced myself, he said, "OH, are you any relation to David Howlett, the Oxford scholar?" We had a lovely conversation, and some time later, when my brother was visiting from Oxford, the two of them met and launched a mutually-beneficial relationship. But the guys at the bar refused to speak to me again. My brother always spoke highly of your husband and father. My thoughts are with you as you adjust to your new reality.

Aidan Breen

October 15, 2018

I am very sorry to hear of the death of Robert. It was my great pleasure to meet this very unassuming and humble gentleman down in Kilkenny. He commissioned me to make a brooch for him based on the Dunadd stone sketch, I was chuffed he had asked me. I regularly told my wife, Mary, that he was the Einstein of the Insular Art world. He once told me. " if you live a long time you get old"

Sean Taylor

October 12, 2018

When I was his graduate student, he always made me feel welcome, a member of the community of curators for the body of Old English poetry. Once, quite by chance, my colleague Amy Michaels and I ran into Prof. Stevick at the coat-check of the British Museum, and he bounded up to us (Prof. Vaughan has at one time doubted this description, but I maintain to this day, he positively bounded) and after greetings, asked us, "have you seen it yet?" After some consternation, he specified: the Beowulf manuscript. Back then, the Manuscript room was just about 15 yards from the coat check. So we all walked over, and there it was, under the glass, opened to the end of the Exordium, and the account of the funeral of Scyld. After admiring it for a moment, Prof. Stevick addressed me: "Well. Go ahead." I understood that he desired me to read it aloud. And I did so, to the end of the Exordium, gathering some audience around as I went. I will always cherish the look I saw on Prof. Stevick's face as I read, as if to say, "that's my boy."

Initial (Luke) LIndsifarne Gospesl

Miceal Vaughan

October 11, 2018

As someone whom Bob hired in 1973 to teach beside him at UW, I owe a lot to his many personal and scholarly contributions during my own career as a member of the English Department at UW. He was a firm, quiet mentor whose work on medieval English and Irish manuscripts provided a model for my own later progress in textual studies. I also valued his engagement with University-level collegial activities, and followed him as a member of the important Advisory Committee on Faculty Code and Regulations.

His dry sense of humor leavened his sharp critical take on our profession, and his linguistic, literary and artistic insights into early medieval culture will remain as lasting contributions to our, and our students', understanding and appreciation of the sophisticated arts of our forebears of more than a millennium (or two) in the past.

He will be greatly missed by his many colleagues at UW and the many more across the world. May he rest in peace!

Dawnette Thompson

October 11, 2018

I am so sorry to learn of Robert's passing. He and I corresponded over the course of several years regarding our mutual Stevick ancestry, and I always enjoyed the interaction. Please accept my sincere condolences.

Mary Lynne Finn

October 8, 2018

Dear Mrs. Stevick and family,
I took a year of Old English from Dr. Stevick at the University of Washington in 1981 or so. The first quarter was the study of English itself and how it had developed from old English through middle English to modern; the second and third quarters we read and studied Beowulf. I still have the old English dictionary I bought then because it is a reminder of how much I enjoyed the class.
Later, as a librarian at the Bellevue Library, I often saw Dr. Stevick there. I was always delighted to say hello and talk for a few minutes. He remembered me and my attempt at old English composition twenty years earlier. He said, "it was incorrect of course."
I thought of him as a friend as well a a former teacher. I will always remember his depth of knowledge, his ability to present it understandably, and his wry sense of humor.

Eugene Webb

October 8, 2018

A fine man and an excellent colleague.

Colette Moore

October 8, 2018

I am sorry to hear of Robert's passing. I am his successor in the field of medieval English language and the history of the English language at UW, and, though he retired before I arrived, I am very grateful to him for his wonderful work for the department and for the field. It was always a pleasure to chat with him in the hall now and again: he was a generous colleague. His legacy in the discipline continues: a colleague and I just cited a 2006 article that he wrote on teaching the history of the English language. He is greatly missed. With heartfelt condolences to his family,

Janet Dodd

October 7, 2018

Dear Mrs. Stevick and Family,
I just wanted you to know my Prayers are with you and your Family.
Its hard to find Teacher's that tech because they Truly Love it and Mr. Stevick Loved what he did.
I am Proud to have been Blessed to know him and your family. His advise to me and my children was " Keep reading Books, even if you have to take a trip to the Library"... I will remember for ever.

Linda Suyama

October 7, 2018

Dear Glorene, Lisa, Kayla, and Family,My heartfelt condolences to all for the passing of your beloved husband, father, and grandfather Robert. I was honored and privileged to know him along with wife Glorene as a long time loyal customer of the gallery and as a cherished friend. I can imagine how difficult the loss must be as I reflect upon the passing of my father in 1995. I hope that fond memories and the legacy that he leaves behind will provide comfort during this difficult time. With My Deepest Sympathy,Linda SuyamaAzuma Gallery

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