Today marks forty years since the death of Georges Dumézil (1898-1986); it was fifty years since the death of Émile Benveniste (1902-1976) a few days ago.

Benveniste and Dumézil are the main focus of my very long manuscript Mapping Indo-European Thought: Mythology, Linguistics and Politics in Twentieth Century France, which I discuss more here.

That page links to a few publications about them and their connections to other thinkers, including the re-edition of Dumézil’s  Mitra-Varuna: An Essay on Two Indo-European Representations of Sovereignty (print and open access pdf). I have a book chapter on their work forthcoming next year: “Benveniste, Dumézil and Indo-European Thought in Twentieth Century France”, in Roger Woodard (ed.), Cambridge History of Mythology and Mythography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

They have also been the subject of several of my ‘Sunday History’ posts:

1. Benveniste, Dumézil, Lejeune and the decipherment of Linear B – 5 January 2025

3. Benveniste and the Linguistic Circle of Prague – 19 January 2025

13. The Territory of the Vocabulary and the Vocabulary of Territory: Émile Benveniste – 30 March 2025

17. Émile Benveniste and the Sogdian Word for ‘Knee’ – 27 April 2025

28. Two Greek Words for Kings and the Question of Territory: Wanax, Basileus and Émile Benveniste’s Vocabulaire – 13 July 2025 (updated 6 August 2025)

30. Émile Benveniste on auxiliarity – an Acta Linguistica Hafniensia article, Eli Fischer-Jørgensen, a misplaced abstract and a 1965-66 Collège de France course – 27 July 2025

31. Herman Lommel and the ancient Aryans – Hegel’s great-grandson, Saussure translator and his links to Benveniste, Dumézil and Wikander – 3 August 2025

33. Lucien Gerschel, Georges Dumézil, William Shakespeare and the history of Coriolanus – 17 August 2025

HS 5. Jean de Menasce’s dedication to Émile Benveniste: “in memory of the year of exile”– 1 October 2025

41. Did Benveniste read Derrida’s Of Grammatology? – 12 October 2025

42. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Georges Dumézil and Benoîte Groult: the Académie française and the debate about feminine nouns for professions – 19 October 2025

60. The French contributors to Herman Hirt’s 1936 Festschrift: Linguistics, Nationalism and Nazism – 22 February 2026

64. The limited copies of the 1940 edition of Georges Dumézil’s Mitra-Varuna – 22 March 2026

66. Maurice Blanchot’s Politics and His War-Time Reviews of Georges Dumézil – 5 April 2026

HS 9. Two dedications from Georges Dumézil – to Alfred Ernoux and Luc Estang – 8 April 2026

68. Julia Kristeva’s portrait of Émile Benveniste in The Samurai – 19 April 2026

72. Georges Dumézil, Geographer of the Russian World? (and some notes on the series in which it was supposed to appear) – 17 May 2026

76. Jean de Menasce and Émile Benveniste as translators of T.S. Eliot – 14 June 2026

78. Did Émile Benveniste try to escape to the USA from Lyon in the Second World War? – 28 June 2026

80. The Stockholm Appeal against Atomic weapons – Émile Benveniste, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, Jean Boulier and Cold War Politics – 12 July 2026

81. The Georges Dumézil-Mircea Eliade correspondence – a chronological listing with publication details or archive locations – 19 July 2026

84. The Georges Dumézil-Michel Foucault correspondence – a chronological listing with archival locations – 9 August 2026

90. Georges Dumézil’s 1924 account of the Tutankhamun discovery – 20 September 2026