Dennis Howard Green FBA (26 June 1922 – 5 December 2008) was an English philologist who was Schröder Professor of German at the University of Cambridge.

[1][2] Just before World War II, at the age of eighteen, Green enrolled at Trinity College, Cambridge to study German.

[3] During the war, Green temporarily abandoned his studies to serve in the Royal Tank Regiment, where he rose to the rank of major and participated in the Normandy landings.

During the war, Green was once arrested for having spoken Dutch with a German accent, and in May 1945, he organised a military transport to Halle to enable him to acquire a complete set of Niemeyer medieval texts in exchange for rations.

[5] Unable to conduct his future studies in war-ravaged Germany as he preferred, Green opted for the University of Basel, where he gained his Ph.D. in 1949 under the supervision of Friedrich Ranke.

Green's Ph.D. thesis was a comparative study of the style of Konrad von Würzburg's Der trojanische Krieg and Gottfried's Tristan.

[7] Along with Frederick Pickering, Green became one of a selected group of elite British Germanists with qualifications from leading German-language universities.

Aided by the widespread acclaim which The Carolingian Lord received, Green was from 1966 to 1979 Chair of Modern Languages at Cambridge.

[13] Unlike many other Germanists, Green consistently wrote his monographs on Medieval German literature in English, which made them available to a broader audience.

It examines major aspects of the culture of the early Germanic peoples, including the subjects of religion, law, kinship, warfare and kingship.

His final monograph, Women and marriage in German medieval romance (2009), which he had completed a few weeks before his death, was published posthumously by Cambridge University Press.

[9][16] Following the death of Green, there remained few, if any, scholars in the United Kingdom with the broad competence in Germanic linguistics and philology which he had.

[8] A man of great wanderlust, Green made many exotic journeys during his life, including travelling the Silk Road and Machu Picchu.