Stefán Einarsson (9 June 1897 – 9 April 1972) was an Icelandic linguist and literary historian, who was a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in the United States.
[4] He became a faculty member at Johns Hopkins the same year, 1927, at the invitation of Kemp Malone, for whom he had recorded a study text in Icelandic,[5] and worked there until his retirement in 1962.
[7][9] After retirement he moved back to Iceland and lived in Reykjavík until his death (in Hrafnista nursing home);[10] he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship for 1962–63.
[4][14][15] His second wife, whom he married in December 1954, was Ingibjörg Árnadóttir[4][7] (1896–1980), from Njarðvík, a relative of Halldór Hermannsson, the librarian of the Fiske Icelandic collection at Cornell University.
[22] In Icelandic, in addition to two further books on Icelandic literature, one of them an expansion of his general survey published in English,[23] he also co-edited and wrote a large part of a book on the history of his native Breiðdalur and was responsible for two of the annuals of the Ferðafélag Íslands, covering Eastern Region.
[24] Early in his career, at Sigurður's urging, he wrote a biography of Eiríkr Magnússon, who was his maternal great uncle.