Professor Stanley Brian Greenfield was a University of Oregon professor of English and an internationally recognized expert in Old English literature.

Greenfield died at the age of 65 after a lengthy bout with cancer.

Although he taught a variety of graduate and undergraduate classes in Old and Middle English, Greenfield's specialty was "Beowulf," the 1,500-year-old epic poem which is recognized as the first major piece of English literature.

Greenfield related once that the poem transfixed him as a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley in 1947. "It was a very beautiful discovery of how rich a poem really is," he recalled. He said he decided then that "this is the poem that I want to spend the rest of my life devoted to."

Born in Brooklyn, he received his undergraduate degree from Cornell University and served in the U.S. Army from 1942 to 1946 before receiving a master's degree and a doctor's degree from the University of California.

He taught at the University of Wisconsin from 1950 to 1954 and at Queens College from 1954 to 1959 before coming to the University of Oregon in 1959. He and his wife, Thelma, an English professor and head of the English Department, both retired December 1986.

His books included "A Critical History of Old English Literature," "The Interpretation of Old English Poems," "A Readable Beowulf" and his most recent, "A New Critical Study of Old English Literature." He also was the author of numerous scholarly articles and reviews.

Greenfield was a recipient of the university's Ersted Award for Distinguished Teaching in 1963 and also at various times received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship and a senior fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

This biographical information was taken from The Register-Guard's article "Services pending for retired UO prof" published on Saturday, August 1, 1987; page 7B