Last Wednesday I received an email from Michael with the subject line "Crick, Watson, and hermeneutics". As always, it was interesting, sharp, and original. As we were going to resume our weekly zoom-meetings after Summer next day, I looked forward to talk to him about it then.

On Thursday I got a message saying that the call had to be canceled because he was in hospital, and on Friday that he was dead. A terrible, terrible shock.

I first met Michael at a TEI meeting about 35 years ago. Nearly 30 years ago we began on a cooperation which has lasted until now. It became not only a fruitful professional cooperation, but also a close friendship. Why did we stick together for so long? Perhaps because we had similar kinds of humor, similar interests, and different approaches.

Michael was an astute realist, while I tend towards nominalism. Michael thought of texts primarily as abstract objects, while I think of them primarily as concrete and perceptible. He had a very firm belief in the value of formalization, while I am somewhat less optimistic on that point.

Our concern was not so much our disagreements or agreements about the analysis or markup of specific texts. What intrigued us was that we so often were uncertain or disagreed about our reasons for agreeing or disagreeing. One of our aims, therefore, was to find a theory of markup, and later transcription, which as far as possible was agnostic with respect to realism and nominalism.

This sent us into deep rabbit-holes where we discussed principles as well as nitty-gritty details of markup theory and editorial philology. Sometimes our departure point would be some high-level perspective, sometimes a trivial case, and sometimes (or admittedly far too often) some corner or extreme edge case. As soon as we found something which looked like a solution, we found or invented another case which could not be solved that way.

During the last fifteen or twenty years we had weekly two-hour phone or video meetings. My family got used to hearing the murmur of our conversation in the background, and also to the sudden and loud bursts of laughter: Oh, that was Michael and daddy coming up from a rabbit hole again.

From time to time we stayed for periods in each other's homes. With us Michael became like a family member, the kids thought of him as their "uncle in America". I don't cry very often. This time the whole family cried with me.

As everyone who has met him knows, Michael was not only very intelligent and knowledgeable, he was also, in every meaning of the word, a _good_ human being. I am profoundly thankful for his friendship, and will miss him deeply the rest of my life. There were many who loved Michael. My thoughts go out to his wife: You are not alone in missing Michael, Marian.

Claus Huitfeldt

Video: Michael, Thea, Julie, and Runa. Bergen, 2006