Thanks to Hermelin's prodigious output, there were already in the 1940s more translations of classical Persian literature available in Swedish than in most other European languages. The impact of these translations was, however, fairly limited. As a patient in a lunatic asylum, he remained a marginal figure, and most of his translations were printed privately, paid for by the family. Furthermore, he had an old-fashioned, and at times even odd and idiosyncratic, style in Swedish. He made liberal use of capitals for emphasis and excelled in some quasi-etymological erroneous conjectures (such as substituting 'Omr ("life") for 'Omar Khayyam). On the whole however, his translations are reliable and exact, only occasionally misinterpreting phraseology not easily found in the standard works of reference available to him (Salemann-Zhukovski's Grammar and Francis Joseph Steingass's Dictionary, etc.). At times his style acquires a strong and original, even prophetic, ring that made it especially attractive to poets and writers, such as Vilhelm Ekelund, Hjalmar Gullberg and Gunnar Ekelöf. Similarly, the very personal kind of mysticism that he developed through the years has had more impact as a literary model than as an exegesis of Sufism. His work strikes a grandiose but solitary chord in Swedish writing and Persian scholarship of the 20th century. In 1943 Eric Hermelin received the Imperial Order of the Lion and the Sun from Masud Ansari, the representative of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in Stockholm. Film about Eric Hermelin In 2018 Swedish Television program "K Special" broadcast a one hour film on Eric Hermelin by the Swedish-Iranian film director Ali Boriri. The film entitled "Sufismen och Eric Hermelin" explores Hermelin's biography, translations of Persian literature as well as his views on literature, religion and politics, and contains interviews with Carl-Göran Ekerwald, Ashk Dahlén, Johan Hermelin och Marika Lagercrantz. See also Persian literature Sufism References 1860 births 1944 deaths People from Ödeshög Municipality Swedish-language writers Swedish nobility Translators from Persian Scholars of Sufism Iranologists