Kari Ellen Gade, 68, died peacefully on Saturday evening, March 5, at her home in Bloomington, Indiana, with her sister Anne Lill Gade from Norway and cousin Lisa Gade Asquini from Waterford, Michigan, by her side.

Kari was born in Sandefjord in Vestfold, Norway, about 60 miles southwest of Oslo. She attended the University of Oslo, majoring in German linguistics and minoring in sports and English. She earned her doctorate in Germanic philology and Old Norse philology at the University of Minnesota and joined the faculty of Indiana University in 1986, though for the first two years in that position she was a Mellon Fellow at Stanford University.

She remained loyal to IU Bloomington throughout her career, during which she earned recognition as Provost Professor in the Department of Germanic Studies. Although she taught nearly all the earliest Germanic languages, including Gothic, Old High German, and Old Saxon, her passion was Old Norse philology, on which she was the acknowledged authority. Perhaps her greatest scholarly achievement was serving as one of the five founding editors, alongside dozens of contributing editors, of what is known familiarly worldwide among scholars of the Middle Ages as “The Skaldic Project," the most tangible product of which is the series of massive volumes titled Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages. When the last of the nine volumes is completed within the next few years, this will be the standard, encyclopedic edition of skaldic verse, including introductions, skald biographies, editions, translations, critical apparatus, and commentaries on all surviving works of skalds, nearly 6,000 stanzas.

We learned about the passing this year of Esther Ham from Chair Ben Robinson: “Our cherished colleague Esther passed away on September 24th in hospice under the loving care of her husband Peter. Many of you know that Esther had a struggle with breast cancer last year. She seemed to fight it off with surgery and chemotherapy, but it returned at the end of the summer.

Last year, Esther was promoted to the rank of Full Teaching Professor—it was the first year of the rank's existence at IU and Esther was a true model of the instructional excellence the rank was created to recognize. She arrived in Bloomington in 2001, and—developing the groundwork laid by Bill Shetter—she built our Dutch program into one of the most prominent in the country.