Robert Nisbet Bain (1854–1909) was a British historian and linguist who worked for the
British Museum.[1][2][3]
Life
Bain was born in London in 1854 to David and Elizabeth (born Cowan) Bain.[1]
Bain was a fluent linguist who could use over twenty languages. Besides translating a number of books he also used his skills to write learned books on foreign people and folklore. Bain was a frequent contributor to the Encyclopædia Britannica.[4] His contributions were biographies and varied from
Andrew Aagensen to
Aleksander Wielopolski. He taught himself Hungarian in order that he could read
Mór Jókai in the original after first reading him in German. He translated from Finnish, Danish and Russian and also tackled Turkish authors via Hungarian. He was the most prolific translator into English from Hungarian in the nineteenth century. He married late and died young after publishing a wide range of literature from or about Europe.[1]
Scandinavia. A political history of Denmark, Norway and Sweden from 1513 to 1900. Cambridge: University Press, 1905
The First Romanovs. A History of Moscovite Civilisation and the Rise of Modern Russia Under Peter the Great and His Forerunners. 1905. Reprint, New York: Russell & Russell, 1967.
Slavonic Europe: A Political History of Poland and Russia from 1447 to 1796, Cambridge University Press, 1908.
The last King of Poland and his contemporaries. London: Methuen, 1909
Charles XII and the Collapse of the Swedish Empire 1682-1719, NA Kessinger Pub. Co. 2006,
ISBN1-4326-1903-9.
Translations
Russian Fairy Tales, 1892
Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales, London : Lawrence and Bullen 1894
^Bredsdorff, Elias (1 January 1947). "Danish Literature in English Translation". Orbis Litterarum. 5 (1): 187–257.
doi:
10.1111/j.1600-0730.1947.tb00954.x.