Stephen J. Herben Jr.

[18][19] Two months later, earlier employment in the forestry commission came in useful when an estate on which he was hunting caught fire and he was put in charge of the volunteer firefighters.

[33][34][35][36][37][38] A decade later, in 1935, a paper by Herben Jr. titled simply "Heorot" placed the hall northeast of Roskilde, on the basis of the place names Stor Hiort and Lille Hiorte on an 18th-century map;[39] the suggestion went against the conventional belief that Heorot was based on a settlement at Lejre, and has been called "practically groundless".

[3] He was put in charge of abstracting articles from philological journals for the 1934 release of Webster's New International Dictionary, in addition to his etymological work;[42] the chief etymologist for the edition was Princeton professor Harold H. Bender,[42] with whom Herben Jr., then still an instructor at Princeton, had written a 1927 article on the etymology of several English words rooted in German.

[4][5] In "A Note on the Helm in Beowulf", Herben Jr. linked the neck protection on the recently excavated Valsgärde 6 and 8 helmets with the description of in the poem as "encircled with lordly chains".

[47] The article was one of Herben Jr.'s better-known publications,[14] and was still regarded 75 years later, in 2012, as "a groundbreaking and most useful piece of research" and "perhaps ... the most familiar [analysis of contemporary arms and armor] within Chaucerian scholarship".

[6] Herben Jr.'s teaching, which including a visiting stint at Stanford University,[3] was interrupted in 1949 by injuries sustained in a car accident.

[2] Driving from Williamsburg to Washington in February, he received, according to a former student who wrote to the Princeton Alumni Weekly, "a severe concussion and a bad shaking-up".

[48] The Boston Post dubbed it "entirely a family affair", for the best man was Herben Jr.'s brother, and the maid of honor Mary Shattuck's sister, Frances.

[54] A fund for the purchase of history materials was established in his name, and that of Howard L. Gray,[55] at Bryn Mawr by Mary O. Slingluff of the class of 1931.

[15] One of Herben Jr.'s books, a rare 1617 copy of The Faerie Queen; The Shepheards Calendar: Together with the Other Works of England's Arch-Poët, Edm.

Spenser signed by John Dryden,[56] was bequeathed at his death to Julia McGrew of Vassar College's Department of English, who subsequently donated it to the school.