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Timothy McFarland obituary

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Timothy McFarland, who has died aged 76, was an expert on medieval German literature. He had a particular love for the epic poetry of Wolfram von Eschenbach, the author of Parzival, which he taught with passion to generations of students. He co-edited a collection of essays devoted to Eschenbach's less well-known Willehalm.

Timothy was born in Hamilton, New Zealand. His childhood was overshadowed by the early death of his mother and his father's taking his own life. He often recalled being summoned by the headmaster of his boarding school to be told of his father's death: he was just told to go and get a glass of hot milk from matron.

Despite hating the school, he performed brilliantly. He completed an MA from Auckland in German at the age of 20. Then a Humboldt scholarship took him to Munich, where he remained for nine years – first as a student, then as a foreign language assistant in the university.

Coming from sheltered New Zealand, it was exciting to witness Germany recovering from the war. He would say that it was through the fridges of his friends that he experienced the German economic miracle: beer, wine, Sekt and champagne. He arrived in London in October 1965 to join the German department of University College London, from which he retired in 2000.

Timothy was everything but a narrow medievalist. Because his intellectual curiosity was boundless, he did not publish all he would have wanted. There were too many projects on the go: a historical guidebook to Bavaria, a study of the American modernist review the Dial, another of music composed in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. He was the antithesis of the modern academic tendency to specialisation or "relevance". If the impact of a great university teacher is on the horizons they open up and the intellectual conversations they spark, he was unrivalled.

After retirement, he continued to be an active participant in London's academic scene. A man with innumerable friends, of whom I was one, he is survived by his wife, Jenny, who had shared his life for 40 years, and whom he married in 2011.


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