A scholar of Old English, Old Norse, folklore, and mythology, he earned a B.A. from the University of Georgia in 1961, a B.A. from Cambridge University in 1963 (with the support of a Marshall Scholarship), and his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1969 with a dissertation on Old Icelandic literature (The King and the Icelander: a study in the short narrative forms of Old Icelandic prose).^[3] He taught at Stanford and Cornell for thirteen years before returning to Harvard in 1985; he retired in 2012.^[4]

Some of his major works include Child’s Children: Ballad Study and Its Legacies (ed. with Barbara Hillers, 2012), ‘Speak Useful Words or Say Nothing’: Old Norse Studies by Joseph Harris (2008),^[5] and Prosimetrum: Crosscultural Perspectives on Narrative in Prose and Verse (ed. 1997).^[6] Author of over 100 scholarly articles, he also contributed to Seamus Heaney's best-selling translation of Beowulf.^[7]

His research has been supported by grants from the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study,^[1] the German Academic Exchange Service, the Fulbright Program, the Guggenheim Foundation,^[8] the American Council of Learned Societies,^[9] the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and the Rockefeller Foundation.^[4] He is a corresponding fellow of the Royal Gustavus Adolpus Academy, Uppsala, Sweden.