Ralph Elliott

Ralph Warren Victor Elliott AM ( born August 14, 1921 as WHV Rudolf Ehrenberg in Berlin, † in the week before 27 June 2012 in Canberra) was an Australian Anglist, linguist, literary scholar and expert runes.

Elliot was the son of the Berlin architect Kurt Ehrenberg. His grandfather was jurist Victor Ehrenberg; his grandmother was the daughter of the jurist Rudolf von Jhering. He was cousin of singer and actress Olivia Newton-John. During the Nazi period he lived with his uncle, Max Born, the later Nobel laureate, in Edinburgh, Scotland.

He studied from 1939 at the University of St Andrews. In 1940 he was interned in Canada and could only 10 months later to return to the UK in a camp of the Royal Pioneer Corps. On 12 May 1943 he changed his name to Ralph Warren Victor Elliott. At the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, he trained as an officer. He was a lieutenant in the Royal Leicestershire Regiment, and from April 1945 in the Manchester Regiment. For operations in the Teutoburg Forest, he was several times severely wounded. After the war he was able in 1949 to complete his studies at the University of St Andrews. He taught briefly at St Andrews, in 1949 at the newly founded University College of North Staffordshire.

Together with his wife Margaret Robinson and his three children and his father, he emigrated to Australia and became a professor at Flinders University, in 1974 at the Australian National University.