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I met Scotty Littleton for the first time in Vancouver, BC, in 1983, along with several other pezzonovanti in the field of Indo-European studies (for example, Edgar Polomé, Will Sayers, and Françoise Bader), and I think that I counted him as a friend and a valued colleague from that time on. Scotty's major achievement in this field was, of course, The New Comparative Mythology, the premier introduction (published in English) to the important thought of Georges Dumézil, and which still stands as a most comprehensive, clear-eyed and uncluttered vade mecum for this French mythologist's work. (We have Coutau- Bégarie's L'oeuvre de Georges Dumézil [1998] and García Quintela's Dumézil une introduction [2001], both certainly valuable, but Littleton's earlier work remains as a strong and reliable source and a uniformly high-level performance). It is a great pity that a projected Fourth Edition of the NCM, to bring up to date the late work of Dumézil and the scholarship that led from him (and also, unfortunately, to take up such grotesque side-shows as the attacks on the French académicien as a purported cryptofascist or Nazi sympathizer) never came to fruition.
Scotty always was an enthusiast, and one who wore his own scholarly achievements lightly. He was responsible for valuable entries in the early...