He began studying mathematics at Göttingen University, and his interest in the history of mathematics led him to read about the achievements of medieval Muslim mathematicians, which led him to start learning Arabic. This preoccupation with Oriental subjects brought him under the spell of Friedrich Karl Andreas (q.v.), the inspiring interpreter of ancient Iranian texts with his wealth of knowledge and ideas. The fact that Henning became a specialist of Iranistics as Andreas’s student belongs to the greatest merits of this unique teacher and inspirer. He was grateful to Andreas throughout his life but did not follow him in some of his wrong tracks. After his short work in Leiden on the “Concordance of Islamic Tradition” (Hadith), Henning received his doctorate in 1930/31 with his award-winning work on “The Middle Persian Verb of the Turfan Texts” (Henning, 1933a), which has remained an indispensable aid for the study of Middle Persian.
He followed systematically the pattern of Middle Persian grammar that Carl Salemann had developed in his outline of Iranian philology, which was tried and tested and was again adopted by A. Ghilain in his essay on the Parthian language. The Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin then commissioned Henning in 1932 to edit Andreas’s posthumous revision of the Iranian Turfan texts, which had remained incomplete. There appeared subsequently thematically arranged collections of Middle Persian and Parthian texts in rapid succession in the reports of the Prussian Academy of Sciences: “Middle Iranian Manichaica from Chinese Turkistan” I, 1932 (a Middle Persian cosmogonic text), II, 1933b (shorter Middle Persian prose and metric texts), III, 1934a (shorter Parthian prose and metric texts).
Henning methodically sought and showed the right way between the non-annotated editing and extensive annotation of earlier works, and he never followed Max Müller’s method of transliterating and transcribing texts. In his 1934 edition, he replaced this method of transcribing with Hebrew letters—which Salemann had introduced—by an unequivocal, practical use of Latin letters for transliteration. This could clearly be typewritten for texts in all Iranian languages written in the Manichean script (Henning 1934a, p. 911), and it has since been used for rendering Iranian Turfan texts. It is regrettable that these editions do not indicate which of the discoveries issued from Andreas and which of them from Henning.
What counts, What counts, however, is the high scientific value of the editions, the quality of the editorial work, the cognitive value of the texts, and their wide scope, which exceeded all earlier editions. Later research was not able to add much to the results achieved by Andreas and Henning, and when it did, it merely enhanced the value of the texts discerningly selected by the editors. An example is Hans Heinrich Schaeder’s proof that the Manichean mission story M2 mentions in the figure of ptyg a disciple of Mani, Patticius, whose name was also that of Mani’s father (Schaeder, 1934, pp. 67-68).
A new expanded and corrected edition of Henning’s early texts, the corrections being partially due to Henning himself, has been produced by Mary Boyce in the collection she prepared as a reader for teaching purposes (Boyce, 1975). Henning’s fourth edition, “Ein manichäisches Bet- und Beichtbuch” (1937), is his single and undoubtedly greatest editorial achievement. He managed to decipher a voluminous Manichean Sogdian collection, for the comprehension of which no parallels or models were available, and the vocabulary of which was practically unknown, and thus he laid the foundation for the research into Manichean Sogdian literature.
The years 1936 and 1937 can be marked as a crucial point in Henning’s life and work. For himself and for Maria Polotsky, the sister of the famous German-Jewish Egyptologist and Semitist who became his wife in 1937 (he had risked his life bringing her out of Germany in 1936), his move to England in 1936 meant escaping from the Fascist regime ruling in Germany. His departure from Germany meant that teaching commitments of various kinds had to replace his research activity at the academy, but this did not mark the end of his research work.
It led, on the contrary, to an expansion of his academic work to include almost all subjects of Middle Iranian philology, many problems of New Iranian dialectology, New Persian linguistic history and Avesta research, and even research about non-Iranian neighbors. He now devoted his work and time to dealing with problems that he recognized as being soluble and which he deemed important for Iranistics. Thus he wrote articles instead of producing his previous voluminous text editions with their monographic character. The prob-lem-solving article became the form in which Henning communicated with his readers, and although he occasion-ally still wrote monographs (e.g., “Sogdica,” 1940; “Zoro-aster: Politician or Witch-Doctor?” 1951), these were more like highly condensed collections.
A typical monograph is his “Mitteliranisch,” a classical contribution to the description of Iranian linguistics (1958). Characteristic for this period in Henning’s work is also his switching to the English language of his adopted country, which he mastered as perfectly as his mother tongue. But he never abandoned his native German language; his aforementioned “Mitteliranisch” is a typical example of the precise and concise, and yet clearly intelligible, elegant German academic language.
Henning was active from 1936 as “Parsee Community’s Lecturer in Iranian Studies” at the London School of Oriental Studies, and from 1939 as Senior Lecturer. The outbreak of World War II interrupted his academic career, and in 1940 he was interned on the Island of Man as a citizen of a hostile state. This was a very difficult period for Henning and his wife, all the more so because their daughter Anne was born at this time. After his release, he followed the School to Cambridge, to which it had been evacuated. In 1946 Henning taught Sanskrit and Iranian languages as visiting professor at Columbia University in New York. Ultimately he became Head of the Department of the Languages and Cultures of the Near and Middle East of the School of Oriental and African Studies, but in 1961 he accepted a chair at the University of California in Berkeley, where he worked as professor of Iranian Studies until his death on 8 January 1967.
The early death of this great scholar as the result of a fall sealed the fate of a man handicapped as a result of a grave illness in his early years, whose gigantic mental achievement had to be attained despite his physical affliction. “His spirit belied his body,” as was said in one of his numerous obituaries. Mary Boyce, to whom I owe several of the following recollections about Henning, wrote: “A childhood illness led to lifelong bodily frailty, but he had nevertheless immense intellectual stamina. He preferred to work through the night (a habit he had acquired as Andreas’ student), because it was a time free from interruptions.”
Walter Bruno Henning
