'A shadowy but important figure': Rudolf Thomas Siegfried

Scholars have long identified Whitley Stokes as the most important Irish figure in the emergence of Celtic philology in the nineteenth century as a branch of the largely German discipline of comparative philology. Stokes took the methodologies employed by J.C. Zeuss in his 'Grammatica celtica' and influenced generations of scholars. Relatively little has been written, however, about Stokes' teacher, Rudolf Thomas Siegfried (1830-63), who came from the German tradition (a pupil of Bopp, Weber and Roth) to Dublin and introduced Zeuss' magnum opus to a range of scholars in Ireland until his premature death. This paper uses archival material from Dublin, London and Germany as well as previously unseen letters from Siegfried in his family's possession in Dessau to establish Siegfried as the missing link and foundation stone in Ireland of the modern discipline of Celtic philology.