Professor Roger Michael Walker, B.A., Ph.D., F.R.Hist.S.

Roger Walker was born in Huddersfield on 25 July 1938 and attended Huddersfield College School. He graduated with first class honours in French and Spanish from Manchester University and began his career as assistant lecturer in Spanish at the University of Bristol in 1961. He joined the Spanish Department at Birkbeck in 1963 and spent the rest of his life there. He remained lecturer until 1972 and was reader until 1980 when he was appointed Professor of Spanish Medieval Studies, a chair he held until his untimely death at the age of sixty. Walker co-authored Cassell’s compact Spanish-English, English-Spanish Dictionary (1969) and published an edition of the Estoria de Santa Maria Egiçiaca in 1972. He was awarded his doctorate in 1970 for a study of an early-fourteenth-century text which was published under the title Tradition and Technique in `El Libro del Cavallero Zifar’ (1974). Proud of hisYorkshire bluntness, Walker was an original thinker who set out to rebut the prevalent nationalistic approach to Spanish medieval scholarship. He was convinced that the anomalous character of much of the country’s medieval literature could be explained by Arab cultural influence lasting for seven centuries and, in order to acquire first-hand knowledge of Spain’s Islamic heritage, he studied Arabic. Walker’s research was concentrated on the Spanish medieval epic, the romance and hagiographical texts and he published many papers on the Poema de mio Cid and the Libro de buen amor. He also worked on sixteenth and seventeenth-century Portugese literature, particularly the work of Camões, the national poet. Camões e o Pensamento Filosòfico do Seu Tempo was published in 1979. Walker made his mark as an administrator as well as a teacher and scholar and for a number of years his research projects were on the back burner. He was a popular choice as the first Head of the Centre for Language and Literature at Birkbeck in 1987 and his tenure as Vice-Master from 1988-93 earned him the respect of staff and students alike during difficult times. He served on London University’s Academic Council and Senate and the committee of the Modern Humanities Research Association, whose Style Book he revised in 1991; he served as Hispanic editor of its journal, Modern Language Review from 1980-8 and general editor from 1983-93 and was elected a life member of the Association in 1994. He was President of the British branch of the Société Rencesvals, 1988-91 and of the London Medieval Society, 1988-92. Walker was a member of the Spanish panel for the first Research Selectivity Exercise in 1989, chair of the Research Assessment Exercise panel for French, Spanish, Russian and European Studies in 1992 and of the Iberian and Latin-American panel for the 1997 exercise. The last ten years of Walker’s life were spent in collaboration with his Birkbeck colleague, W H Liddell, editing the unpublished papers of the seventeenth-century diplomat and poet, Sir Richard Fanshawe. A number of articles on Fanshawe’s Spanish and Portugese diplomatic experiences and literary interests have appeared and a catalogue raisonné of the Fanshawe papers in the Valence House Museum at Dagenham was scheduled for publication in late 1999. To be near the museum, Walker moved to Harwich and for several years served as president of the Harwich Fishermen’s Association, often putting to sea in a trawler. He died in Colchester on 11 January 1999.