Hilda Ellis Davidson - Life

Life

Hilda Roderick Ellis was born at Bebington, Wirral, Cheshire, in 1914. She was educated at Park High School for Girls, Birkenhead. Later, Davidson received a First Class Honours degree from Newnham College, Cambridge, in English, Archaeology and Anthropology, and afterward studied pagan Scandinavian religion for her doctorate. In 1943, Davidson, under her maiden name Hilda Ellis, published her first book; The Road to Hel: A Study of the Conception of the Dead in Old Norse Literature. Davidson was a lecturer at Royal Holloway College from 1939 to 1944 and after that at Birbeck College. In 1949, she joined the Folklore Society.

Davidson joined the Lucy Cavendish College in Cambridge in 1969 as a Calouste Gulbenkian Research Fellow, was appointed a College Lecturer in 1971, was an elected a Fellow in 1974, and was made Vice-President between 1975 and 1980. In 1980, Davidson also began working on a biography of Katharine Mary Briggs, which she published in 1986. Davidson received the Folklore Society's Coote Lake Medal in 1984, and her 1988 work Myths and Symbols of Pagan Europe won the Katharine Briggs Prize that year. Davidson was an honorary member of the Folklore Society beginning in 1985 and she founded the Katharine Briggs Club in January 1987. The first three publications of the club were edited by Davidson and the third was dedicated to her.

Another interest Davidson held was in the history of folklore scholarship itself, which led to her editing with Carmen Blacker a collection of essays on Women and Tradition: A Neglected Group of Folklorists (2000). In Davidson's later work, she focused on cultural and religious links between Germanic and Celtic cultures, showcased at her presence at the Nordic-Celtic-Baltic Legend Symposiums in Ireland and Copenhagen throughout the 1990s. She was unable to attend the 2005 meeting due to poor health.

In her later years she ran the Cambridge Folklore Group. Davidson was a bellringer and churchwarden at her local church. Davidson died in Kent in January 2006, aged 91, leaving 2 children and 10 grandchildren.