Francis Owen was a Canadian philologist and military officer. He was Professor of German and Chairman of the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Alberta, and the author of the first complete scholarly work on the history and early culture of the Germanic peoples. His works on this subject are still cited in modern scholarship.
Biography
Francis Owen was born on 6 September 1886 in Saltfleet, Ontario. Owen earned his bachelor's degree, master's degree and Education Diploma from the University of Toronto. In 1907 he was the recipient of the Governor General's Medal. He did post-graduate work in Marburg and Leipzig, and was an instructor of German at Victoria College at the University of Toronto from 1908-1914. Owen served in World War I as a lieutenant with the 1st Canadian Division and with the 14th Battalion of the 3rd Brigade of the Royal Montreal Regiment. In 1918, he was part of the training staff of the Young Soldiers’ Battalion. From 1919 to 1920 he was a modern language instructor for returned soldiers' preparatory matriculation classes at the university. Owen joined the University of Alberta in 1920 as a lecturer in German and was an assistant professor of modern languages there from 1925 to 1926. He earned his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1926 with a thesis on alliterative verse in Germanic poetry. Owen subsequently served as an associate professor of modern languages at the University of Alberta. In April 1932 Owen left Canada for Germany to conduct archaeological research. On this trip he worked with Martin Heinrich Gustav Schwantes of the University of Kiel at sites associated with the Pre-Roman Iron Age. While staying in Germany, Owen experienced Adolf Hitler's rise to power at first hand. Returning to Canada in July 1933, Owen stated that Adolf Hitler had saved Germany from Communism. He subsequently advocated a revision of the Treaty of Versailles in favor of Germany. Following the retirement of John F. Coar, Owen was appointed Professor of German and of Modern Languages at the University of Alberta. In April 1936, Owen left on another trip to Europe to conduct archaeological research. Upon his return to Canada in September 1936, Owen foresaw a coming war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. In 1938, Owen wrote a series of articles for the Edmonton Journal analyzing Mein Kampf, where he predicted that Adolf Hitler would start another world war. As a response to the Nazi threat, Owen became a strong advocate of preparing Canada and the rest of the British Empire for war. In the spring of 1939, Owen predicted a future alliance between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and became a strong opponent of the policy of appeasement. Once war was declared by the British in September 1939, Owen supported the war effort wholeheartedly and advocated the immediate destruction of the regime of Adolf Hitler, whom he denounced as a "gangster". He correctly suspected that the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact had contained a secret protocol dividing Europe into Nazi and Soviet spheres of influence. As a fierce opponent of Nazism, Owen led the efforts at the University of Alberta to enlighten students about its dangers. During World War II, Owen was a major and later served as lieutenant colonel officer-in-command of the University of Alberta Division of the Canadian Officers' Training Corps. From 1947 he served as Head of the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Alberta. An expert on Russian affairs, Owen also taught Russian at the University of Alberta. He was an avowed critic of theories of racial supremacy, declaring that "there is no pure ethnic stock anywhere on the face of the earth." Owen retired as Professor Emeritus in August 1952. Following his retirement, Owen settled in Hanover, Germany and dedicated himself entirely to continuing his research on the early history and culture of the Germanic peoples. Owen had been interested in this subject since he was an undergraduate student, and had dedicated all of his free time to researching it since 1928, reading hundreds of books and making numerous research expeditions to countries throughout Europe. Drawing upon a combination of anthropological, archaeological, historical and linguistic evidence, Owen's magnum opus was published in 1960 as The Germanic People. It was the first complete scholarly work on early Germanic history and culture ever published in English. His research on this subject is still cited in scholarly works such as the Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture and the Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde. As a researcher, Owen was particularly interested in philology and the Indo-European origins of the Germanic languages. He lectured frequently on Indo-European studies and actively worked towards enlightening the students about the various Indo-European language groups. He was also the author of the novels The Ravens of Wodan and Tristan and Isolde. Owen's first wife, Eva Violet, died on 2 January 1945. In August 1945 he married Doris Garrison Stevens, with whom he had a son, William. Owen died in Edmonton, Alberta on 22 December 1975.
Selected works
The Origin of Alliteration as a Device of Poetic Technique in Germanic Verse, 1926
