[KS] William E. Skillend

[gkl1 at columbia.edu]

    Many thanks to Boudewijn for informing us of the passing of Bill  
Skillend, one of the pioneers of Korean Studies in the the West, and  
for providing the link to his charming memoir on his early days at  
Cambridge. But it was sad to hear, from Jim Hoare's posting, of Bill's  
seeming abandonment of the field during his retirement. Whatever the  
reasons for this, they can't keep me from remembering and appreciating  
his contributions to our field.
    During my own career I had only a few contacts with him but the  
memory of his kindnesses and wit is still strong. His importance for  
the development of Korean Studies in England and, more broadly, in  
Europe have already been noted. But he can also be credited with the  
establishment of Korean Studies at Columbia University, where he was a  
visiting professor during 1963 and 1964. During that period he was  
encouraged to stay at Columbia on a permanent basis, and had he done  
so, I surely would have been working somewhere else for the  
thirty-seven years that followed. As it was, though, he had decided to  
return to the UK, and opportunity opened there for me. It was an honor  
to have followed him.
    Prior to Bill's Columbia year there had been some gestures toward  
Korean Studies there: a Korean Methodist pastor, the Rev. Yun, had  
taught a course in Korean during the late years of the Korean War and  
afterward, and Prof. Peter Lee had provided a Korean presence for a  
year or two. But between those events and the mid-1960s there was Bill  
Skillend, and in the meantime the "Department of Chinese and  
Japanese," as it was then called (but soon thereafter changed to "East  
Asian Languages and Cultures"), had decided to establish a position in  
Korean Studies. When I arrived to teach in the fall semester of 1964,  
there was a two-year program in Korean language, with a highly  
talented Korean traching assistant; a new Korean section in the East  
Asian Library with all of the Korean books in the Japanese section now  
culled and called to a new home of their own, where they were  
recatalogued and reshelved; and two strong graduate students already  
working on advanced degrees. A great deal of the credit for these  
developements must go to Bill Skillend. And he could not have been  
nicer or more helpful to me in getting me prepared for my new job.
     As a Korea scholar, Bill Skillend is best known for his <Kodae  
Sos?l: A Survey of Korean Traditional Style Popular Novels>, pp. 268,  
(Luzac & Co., Ltd., London, 1968). This may not be so easy to find  
these days, so it would be nice if someone might arrange a new  
printing, because it is still very useful for its analytical richness  
and its detailed survey of as many traditional Korean novels as Bill  
could track down in Korea and Japan, as well as in libraries in the  
U.S. and Europe. His listing has 531 entries. While many Korean  
scholars had been exploring this field for some time, none of them had
come up with a presentation of their results as thorough, original,  
and systematic as this book. (As has already been noted, it did not  
take long for a pirated Korean edition to appear.) The introduction  
alone was a revelation in 1968, and could still serve today as a  
resource for introducing traditional fiction in the Korean language.  
That was the main purpose, but Bill went even further in tracking down  
and listing traditional Hanmun versions of these works, and in  
clarifying, when it was possible to do so, which came first, and which  
of various possible texts had been the basis for the translation.  
Korean literature has not been my main concern, but as the only  
professor of Korean studies at Columbia for most of my 37 years there  
(Columbia now has three established professorships, and a new fourth  
one in Korean Buddhism presently advertising for candidates), I made  
frequent recourse to it in my teaching and general culture courses.  
Its well-worn pages and tattered binding now signal to me how much I  
have learned from it.
    My condolences to his family and former colleagues and friends  
around the world.

Gari Ledyard

Quoting "Walraven, B.C.A." <B.C.A.Walraven at hum.leidenuniv.nl>:

>
> We are saddened by the news we received from his son David that on    
> the 21th of February, William E. Skillend, the first Korean Studies   
>  professor of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London    
> and a pioneer of Korean Studies in Europe, has after an illness    
> passed away peacefully at the age of 83. He was the driving force    
> behind the creation of the Association for Korean Studies in Europe   
>  (AKSE), which was constituted in 1977, and held its first  
> conference   in London. From 1982 to 1984 he was AKSE President.  
> This was only   one of the ways his activities benefited others. A  
> conscientious and   painstaking scholar he went to great lengths,  
> for instance, to   compile an annotated bibliography of all the  
> pre-modern works of   fiction he could trace in libraries all over  
> the world. The result,   his book Kodae sos?l, offered a great  
> quantity of essential   information for other scholars and in Korea  
> was judged so useful   that it merited a pirated edition.
> He was one of the founding members who made of AKSE not just an    
> academic association but also a circle of friends. The book AKSE    
> dedicated to him on his 60th birthday (Twenty Papers on Korean    
> Studies Offered to Professor W.E. Skillend) was testimony to the    
> love and respect he inspired among his colleagues from many    
> countries. Younger scholars who take the present state of Korean    
> Studies for granted, will better understand how significant the    
> contribution of Bill Skillend has been in establishing the    
> discipline from scratch when they read the amusing piece he himself   
>  wrote about his student days in Cambridge, where he enrolled as a    
> student of Japanese, but also laid the foundation for his career as   
>  a much loved and appreciated teacher of Korean and Korean    
> literature: http://www.ames.cam.ac.uk/deas/japanese/fifty_years.pdf
>
> He will be remembered these days in many places with gratitude and affection.
>
>
> Boudewijn Walraven
>
> AKSE President
>