Edward Oswald Gabriel Turville-Petre FBA (25 March 1908 – 17 February 1978) was an English philologist who specialized in Old Norse studies.

Born at Bosworth Hall, Leicestershire to a prominent Roman Catholic family, Turville-Petre was educated in English at the University of Oxford under the tutelage of J. R. R. Tolkien.

He eventually became Professor of Ancient Icelandic Literature and Antiquities at the University of Oxford and a leading member of the Viking Society for Northern Research.

Turville-Petre was the author of numerous works on Old Norse literature and religion which have remained influential up to the present day.

He spent much time on the remote farms in the northern and eastern parts of the island, and developed a strong fascination with the traditional way of life of the Icelanders.

By this time, he had already published several influential papers on Old Norse literature and religion, and had established himself as a major authority in these fields.

[8] In August 1942 he was dispatched by the Foreign Office to the Faroe Islands "in order to study the inhabitants, their politics and conditions of life", staying there for two months.

[3] In 1941–1942 Turville-Petre entered into a notable dispute with Charles Leslie Wrenn over the date of composition of the sagas of Icelanders.

[10] He had little patience for charlatans, but was known for his tolerance and kindness to amateurs genuinely interested in gaining knowledge in his fields of expertise.

[12] In 1942, together with Elizabeth Stefanyja Olszewska (1906–1973), wife of Alan S. C. Ross, Turville-Petre published a translation of Guðmundar saga biskups.

The introduction written by Turville-Petre to this work reveal a clear admiration for Guðmundur Arason's contemporary, Páll Jónsson.

In this work, Turville-Petre contended, in disagreement with many Scandinavian scholars, that Icelandic literature provided much useful information on the early history and culture of Scandinavia.

Origins of Icelandic Literature also deals extensively with the Kings' sagas, which he believed were the product of both earlier Scandinavian traditions and more recent Christian influences.

By the 1950s, it had become fashionable among some scholars to dismiss the writings of Snorri Sturluson on Norse mythology and other subjects as mere literary inventions without any foundations in earlier traditions.

In view of this, he became greatly interested in the research of the celebrated French philologist Georges Dumézil, known for his comparative studies of Indo-European mythology and formulation of the trifunctional hypothesis.

Dumézil had published numerous monographs on the Indo-European components in Germanic mythology, which greatly impressed Turville-Petre.

Between 1953 and 1955, Turville-Petre published sympathetic reviews of three of Dumézil's monographs in the Saga-Book, and in 1956 he invited him to lecture at the University of Oxford.

As such it contrasted with Jan de Vries' second edition of Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte (1956-1957), which fully incorporates the theories of Dumézil, including the trifunctional hypothesis.

[8] At Melbourne, he made significant contributions to the development of Icelandic studies in Australia, which he visited three times in the succeeding years.

[11] In 1972, the Viking Society for Northern Research presented Turville-Petre with Nine Norse Studies, a selection of papers written by him between 1940 and 1962.

Scaldic Poetry provides testimony to his mastery of the subject as a result of a long life of passionate study.

[1] Speculum Norroenum (1981), a festschrift in Turville-Petre's honor edited by Ursula Dronke, was published by the University Press of Southern Denmark after his death.

[1][7] Turville-Petre was highly regarded as a teacher and academic supervisor, and was responsible for the tutoring of generations of scholars in his fields.