Ralph Warren Victor Elliott, AM FAHA (born Rudolf W. H. V. Ehrenberg; 14 August 1921 – 24 June 2012) was a German-born Australian professor of English, and a runologist.
Rudolf and his younger sister, Lena, were sent to live with their uncle, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Max Born, in Edinburgh.
He taught at St Andrews for a while, before moving to the newly created University College of North Staffordshire, where he wrote an influential introduction to the runic script that was published in 1959.
He contributed greatly to the university's and to Canberra's cultural life, such as by helping launch the National Word Festival, and generously tutoring students.
He was a regular reviewer for the Canberra Times for ten years and hosted a talkback radio session on ABC 666.
[9][10] Ralph also published a book of collected essays on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a topic that had interested him since his time in north Staffordshire a quarter of a century earlier, when he wrote the newspaper article "Sir Gawain in Staffordshire: A Detective Essay in Literary Geography" that appeared in The Times newspaper on 21 May 1958.
[11] His work on the Green Knight and its story-locations also produced many essays on the relevant dialect and distinctive landscape topography of the moorlands of North Staffordshire, and scholars now accept that the Staffordshire Moorlands are both the linguistic and the topographic location of many scenes, even if the exact location of the Green Chapel itself remains contentious (the leading rival is near Wetton Mill, some eight miles SE).