Ihre, John

, professor of rhetoric and politics in the university of Upsal, was born in March 1707, and on account of the early death of his father, chiefly educated under his grandfather, then archbishop of Upsal. In 1730 he set out on his travels to improve himself by the company and conversation of learned men. In 1733 he returned to Upsal, where he was elected a member of the academy of sciences. In 1737 he was made public professor of poetry, and in 1748 he was appointed by the king professor of rhetoric and politics; an office, the duties of which he discharged for forty years with great reputation, In 1756 king Adolphus Frederic raised him to the rank of a counsellor of the chancery; two years after to that of patrician; and in 1759 conferred on him the order of the polar star. He died in 1780. In 1756 he undertook a Sueco-Gothic Lexicon, and began to arrange the materials which he had been preparing for the purpose. In 1766 he published a “Lexicon Dialectorum,” in which he explained and illustrated obsolete words, still used in the provinces; and in 1769 his “Glossarium Sueco-Gothicum” was published in 2 vols. folio. He was the author also of an explanation of the old catalogue of the Sueco-Gothic kings, to which are added the old West- Gothic Laws. In his dissertations “De Runorum Antiquitate, Patria, Origine, et Occasu,” he asserts that the Runic writing was formerly used in the greater part of Europe, was introduced into Sweden about the sixth century, and became entirely extinct in the beginning of the fifteenth. He was possessed of a sound judgment and a retentive memory; and so clearly were his ideas arranged, that he had never any need to correct what he had composed. ²