Rolf Bremmer's father, also named Rolf Hendrik Bremmer, was a theologian and preacher associated with the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands and a student of Klaas Schilder. He married Lucie Gera Arina Lindeboom in 1943 in The Hague; she was the daughter of a Reformed preacher. Rolf Jr.'s older brother J.N. Bremmer is professor of church history at the University of Groningen. Bremmer received his master's degree in English language and literature from the University of Groningen in 1977. From 1976 to 1977 he studied at Oxford University as a Harting Student, with Anglo-Saxonists such as Bruce Mitchell, Tom Shippey, and J. M. Wallace-Hadrill. In 1986 he gained his Ph.D. from Radboud University Nijmegen, with a dissertation on a late Middle English treatise on the five senses, directed by F.N.M. Diekstra. He taught English from 1977 to 1979 at Gomarus College in Groningen, and Old and Middle English and historical linguistics at Radboud University from 1979 to 1986. Since 1986 he has been with Leiden University. In 1994 Bremmer was the Erasmus professor at Harvard for Dutch Culture and History. He is a premier Dutch authority on Frisian language and literature, occupying a special professorship in Frisian studies. Bremmer has published and edited books on a variety of topics in Old English language and literature, Middle English language and literature, and Frisian language and literature. He has published on the seventeenth-century scholar and collector Franciscus Junius, he has translated the work on Beowulf by Dutch Anglo-Saxon scholar P. J. Cosijn, and has lectured on J.R.R. Tolkien. His Introduction to Old Frisian , according to E.G. Stanley, is "a book for the twenty-first century...a book of essentials, from which nothing essential has been omitted." In 2009 he published a kind of alphabet book with 26 terms from the Christian lexicon, Van Ambt tot Zonde, illustrated by Geert de Groot, which explains the Christian connotations of such concepts as sin and foreskin; the booklet collects articles originally published in the national daily Nederlands Dagblad. Bremmer serves on the editorial board of the journals The Heroic Age, Neophilologus, and NOWELE, and on the advisory board of the journals Anglo-Saxon and Studies in Medievalism and of the series Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library. In 2010 Bremmer delivered the Toller Lecture at the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies.
Hir is eskriven'. Lezen en schrijven in de Friese landen rond 1330. Hilversum: Verloren / Ljouwert: Fryske Akademy, 2004.
A Bibliographical Guide to old Frisian Studies. Odense: Odense UP, 1992.
The Fyve Wyttes. A Late Middle English Devotional Treatise, Edited from BL MS Harley 2398 with an Introduction, Commentary and Glossary. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1987.
Books edited
Practice in Learning. The Transfer of Encyclopaedic Knowledge in the Early Middle Ages. Paris, Leuven, and Dudley: Peeters, 2010.
Advances in Old Frisian Philology. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007.
Signs on the Edge. Space, Text and Margin in Medieval Manuscripts. Paris, Leuven, and Dudley: Peeters, 2007.
Foundations of Learning. The Transfer of Encyclopaedic Knowledge in the Early Middle Ages. Paris, Leuven, and Dudley: Peeters, 2007.
