Poul Anderson's College Transcripts

So, I've been doing a lot of work recently on Poul Anderson as part of my R. D. Mullen Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from Science Fiction Studies. Basically, besides Tolkien, Poul Anderson is probably the most important SFF writer of the 20th-century alliterative revival. I know he grew up bilingual (English and Danish), and he did translations from Old Norse . . . but when and where, exactly, did he ever learn Old Norse? Did he take it in a college class, or did he learn it entirely on his own?

 So after doing some digging around, it finally occurred to me -- maybe I could just ask the University of Minnesota for his college transcripts.

 Turns out, I can do that . . . so I did.

 And now I'm looking at Poul Anderson's transcripts.

 A number of things leap out at me.
  1. First, they misspell his name Paul Anderson. This is funny, not only because a transcript is an official document, but because the draft programmer for ICFA made the same spelling mistake when he put my presentation title into the system. Notably, Poul's real name is pronounced somewhere halfway between "Paul" and "Poll," and it was almost impossible for native speakers of English to pronounce.
  2. Second, after Anderson graduated the UM in Winter 1948 (degree officially conferred on March 18th, 1948), apparently he want back to school part-time in Spring 1948, all 1950, and for parts of 1951 and 1952. This has never been mentioned in anything I've read about him. An aborted graduate degree, perhaps? Maybe, but somehow I doubt it. These post-graduate courses are split between math and philosophy. Notably, he didn't take any philosophy as an undergraduate, which brings me to . . . .
  3. . . . the dude was seriously into the hard sciences. Absolute no courses in the humanities appear on his undergrad transcript except for languages and two English classes . . . and one of those he withdraw from without completing. Otherwise, every course was math, chemistry, electrical engineering, and physics.
  4. Also, although Poul graduated with distinction, he did earn a grade of "D" in "Calculus IV Advanced." During his freshman year, he also received Cs in "Draw. 7, Desc. Geom" and "Draw. 8, Desc. Geom." I'm not exactly sure what those courses were (architecture, perhaps?), but since he never took another "Draw." class again, they evidently didn't suit him.
So, what about the big question -- languages? Well, turns out that Poul Anderson never did take any course in Old Norse or Old Scandinavian. I was already pretty sure he hadn't -- I'd found an old article in the journal Scandinavian Studies that confirmed that the U of M didn't teach those subjects, although they had courses in modern Swedish and contemporary Scandinavian literature. Instead, Anderson's two languages were German and Spanish.

All in all, quite the interesting little foray into primary research.


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