the University of Oxford In 1953, Turville-Petre was appointed Professor at the University of Oxford (1953-1975). The same year he became General Editor of the text and monographs series of the Viking Society for Northern Research. In 1956, the Society appointed Turville-Petre one of its twelve Honorary Life Members. Following up on his The Heroic Age of Scandinavia, Turville-Petre and Christopher Tolkien published Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks in 1956. It provides a translation and commentary on the Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks, which is considered one of the most archaic and interesting of the Icelandic legendary sagas. With Sigurður Nordal, Turville-Petre was General Editor of the Icelandic Texts (1959-1965), a collection of saga text and translations published in four volumes by Nelson. Turville-Petre received the Knight's Cross of the Order of the Falcon in 1956, and the even more prestigious Grand Knight's Cross of the Order of the Falcon in 1963, both of which were conferred upon him by the President of Iceland. He was the recipient of honorary doctorates from University of Iceland (1961) and Uppsala University (1977), and was a member of many Icelandic and Scandinavian learned societies, including the Icelandic Literary Society (1948), the Royal Gustavus Adolphus Academy (1960), and the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences in Gothenburg (1976). Myth and Religion of the North Since the early 1930s, Turville-Petre had published numerous influential papers on Old Norse religion, particularly on Norse deities such as Odin and Freyr. By the 1950s, it had become fashionable among some scholars to dismiss the writings of Snorri Sturluson on Norse mythology and other subjects as mere literary inventions without any foundations in earlier traditions. Turville-Petre disagreed, and believed that Snorri Sturluson's writings were based on genuine material. In view of this, he became greatly interested in the research of the celebrated French philologist Georges Dumézil, known for his comparative studies of Indo-European mythology and formulation of the trifunctional hypothesis. Dumézil had published numerous monographs on the Indo-European components in Germanic mythology, which greatly impressed Turville-Petre. Between 1953 and 1955, Turville-Petre published sympathetic reviews of three of Dumézil's monographs in the Saga-Book, and in 1956 he invited him to lecture at the University of Oxford. He also published the article "Professor Dumézil and the literature of Iceland" in Hommages á Georges Dumézil (1960). Turville-Petre's research on Old Norse religion culminated in his publishing of Myth and Religion of the North (1964),