W. R. Morfill

William Richard Morfill was an English scholar of the Slavonic languages. From 1900 until his death in 1909 he was Professor of Russian and the other Slavonic languages at the University of Oxford, the first professor of Russian in Britain. Much of his career was spent persuading the university to accept these languages as proper subjects of study.

In 1896 he published The Book of the Secrets of Enoch, the first English translation of the text now called 2 Enoch or Slavonic Enoch, working from Russian, Bulgarian and Serbian manuscripts. R. H. Charles edited the volume and wrote its introduction and notes.

2 Enoch survives only in Old Church Slavonic, in longer and shorter versions, and was unknown to Western scholars until the late 1800s. It describes Enoch's journey through the heavens and his transformation before God. Its date and origin are debated: many scholars place its core in the 1st century CE, while others argue for a much later date.