Lanman, Charles Rockwell

Charles Rockwell Lanman, (born July 8, 1850, Norwich, Conn., U.S.—died Feb. 20, 1941, Boston, Mass.), American scholar of Sanskrit who wrote the widely used Sanskrit Reader (1884) and helped edit the “Harvard Oriental Series,” which offered scholarly English translations of the ancient Hindu Vedic texts.

He received his doctorate from Yale University, where he studied Sanskrit under William Dwight Whitney. After further study in Germany, Lanman was appointed to Johns Hopkins University (1876) and later to Harvard University (1880), where he became Wales professor of Sanskrit (1903–26). In 1891 Lanman became editor of the Harvard Oriental Series, founded and financed by his friend and pupil Henry Clark Warren. During Lanman’s editorship 31 volumes were issued; and many of them, such as Whitney’s Atharva Veda and Arthur B. Keith’s Yajur Veda and Rig Veda Brahmanas, furnished for the first time scholarly translations into English of ancient Sanskrit texts. In 1884 Lanman published the first edition of his Sanskrit Reader, which formed a standard introduction to that language for English-speaking students, remaining in print into the second half of the 20th century.