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Tom Shippey

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Thomas Alan Shippey (born 9 September 1943)<ref name="SFE"/> is a British medievalist, a retired scholar of Middle and Old English literature as well as of modern fantasy and science fiction. He is considered one of the world's leading academic experts<ref name="Houghton Croft Martsch 2014"/> on the works of J. R. R. Tolkien about whom he has written several books and many scholarly papers. His book The Road to Middle-Earth has been called "the single best thing written on Tolkien".<ref name="Nagy2005"/>

Shippey's education and academic career have in several ways retraced those of Tolkien: he attended King Edward's School, Birmingham, became a professional philologist, occupied Tolkien's professorial chair at the University of Leeds, and taught Old English at the University of Oxford to the syllabus that Tolkien had devised.

He has received three Mythopoeic Awards<ref name="Myth 1984"/><ref name="Myth 2001"/><ref name="Myth 2008"/> and a World Fantasy Award.<ref name="WFA 2001"/> He participated in the creation of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, assisting the dialect coaches. He featured as an expert medievalist in all three of the documentary DVDs that accompany the special extended edition of the trilogy, and later also that of The Hobbit film trilogy.

BiographyEdit

Early lifeEdit

Thomas Alan Shippey was born in 1943 to the engineer Ernest Shippey and his wife Christina Emily Kjelgaard in Calcutta, British India, where he spent the first years of his life.<ref name="SFE">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref name="Hanley">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref name="encyc"/> He studied at King Edward's School in Birmingham from 1954 to 1960.<ref name="Preface">Template:Cite book</ref>

Like J. R. R. Tolkien, Shippey became fond of Old English, Old Norse, German and Latin, and of playing rugby.<ref name="Hanley"/><ref name="Houghton Croft Martsch 2014"/> He gained a B.A. from Queens' College, Cambridge, in 1964, his M.A. in 1968, and a PhD in 1970.<ref name="white"/><ref name="SLU CV"/><ref name="encyc">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

MedievalistEdit

Shippey became a junior lecturer at the University of Birmingham, and then a Fellow of St John's College, Oxford, where he taught Old and Middle English.<ref name="Preface"/> In 1979, he was elected to the Chair of English Language and Medieval English Literature at Leeds University, a post once held by Tolkien.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> In 1996, after 14 years at Leeds, Shippey was appointed to the Walter J. Ong Chair of Humanities at Saint Louis University's College of Arts and Sciences, where he taught, researched, and wrote books.<ref name="SLU CV"/> He has been a visiting professor at Harvard University, the University of Texas, and Signum University.<ref name="Signum">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

He has published over 160 books and articles,<ref>See complete list at tomshippey.com: many of these works are now available online.</ref> and has edited or co-edited scholarly collections such as the 1998 Beowulf: The Critical Heritage<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> and in 2005 The Shadow-walkers: Jacob Grimm's Mythology of the Monstrous.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Among several influential articles on the Old English poem Beowulf are an analysis of its principles of conversation,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> a much-cited discussion of the "obdurate puzzle" of the "Modthrytho Episode" (Beowulf 1931b–1962), which seems to describe a cruel irrational queen who then becomes a model wife,<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> and an analysis of "Names in Anglo-Saxon and Beowulf", with special reference to those elsewhere unrecorded. He has also written on Arthurian legend, including its reworkings in medieval and modern literature.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref> His medieval studies have extended as far as to write a book on the lives and deaths of the great Vikings "as warriors, invaders and plunderers", exploring their "heroic mentality", with special reference to the pervasive Norse Bad Sense of Humour..<ref name="Lönnroth 2019"/> The Swedish author Lars Lönnroth commented that nothing like Shippey's "eminently readable book" had been attempted since Thomas Bartholin's 1677 history of Danish antiquity, even if Shippey's use of legendary sources meant that the materials used could not be relied upon as history, only as indications of a shared mindset.<ref name="Lönnroth 2019">Template:Cite journal</ref> See further "Vikings: Legend, History, Mindset", online at academia.edu

Since his retirement and his return to England, he has continued his research<ref>See uppsalabooks.com, which lists his video appearances on social media.</ref> His retirement in 2008 was marked by a festschrift, Constructing Nations, Reconstructing Myth, edited by Andrew Wawn, Graham Johnson and John Walter, with contributions from former students and former colleagues. His Tolkien scholar colleagues including Janet Brennan Croft, John D. Rateliff, Verlyn Flieger, David Bratman, Marjorie Burns, and Richard C. West marked his 70th birthday with a further festschrift, Tolkien in the New Century,<ref name="Houghton Croft Martsch 2014"/> while another volume of essays by former colleagues and students, Literary Speech Acts of the Medieval North: essays inspired by the works of T.A. Shippey, came out in 2020, edited by Eric Bryan and Alexander Ames.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Modern fantasy and science fictionEdit

A fan and follower of science fiction from teenage years, in the early 1980s Shippey worked with Brian Aldiss with the concept of world-building in his Helliconia trilogy.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Under the pseudonym of "John Holm", he was the co-author, with Harry Harrison, of The Hammer and the Cross trilogy of alternate history novels, consisting of The Hammer and the Cross (1993), One King's Way (1995), and King and Emperor (1996).<ref name="SFE"/> For Harrison's 1984 West of Eden, Shippey helped with the constructed language, Yilanè.<ref name="Harrison 2014">Template:Cite book</ref>

Shippey has edited both The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories, and The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories.<ref name="wsj"/> For ten years he reviewed science fiction for The Wall Street Journal,<ref name="wsj">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> and still contributes literary reviews to the London Review of Books.<ref name="SLU CV"/> In 2009, he wrote a scholarly 21-page introduction to Flights of Eagles, a collection of James Blish's works.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> He has given many invited lectures on Tolkien and other topics.<ref name="SLU CV"/> In 2008 he brought out a collection of articles on SF and fantasy, Hard Reading: Learning from Science Fiction, freely available from academia.edu.

Tolkien scholarshipEdit

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Shippey's interest in Tolkien began when he was 14 years old and was lent a copy of The Hobbit.<ref name="white">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Shippey comments on his interest in Tolkien that

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File:Tower, spires, chimneys, Woodhouse Lane, Leeds (Taken by Flickr user 28th January 2013).jpg
Both Shippey and J. R. R. Tolkien were professors at Leeds University, with offices near Woodhouse Lane (pictured), a placename that Shippey thought Tolkien would have taken as a trace of the woodwoses, the wild men of the woods.<ref name="Woodwose"/>

On 11 November 1969, he delivered a lecture on "Tolkien as philologist" at a Tolkien day organised by the Adult Education Department at the University of Birmingham. Joy Hill, Tolkien's private secretary, was in the audience and afterward, she asked him for the script, for Tolkien to read. On 13 April 1970, Shippey received a letter from Tolkien in response; he records that it took him 30 years to decode the "specialised politeness-language of Old Western Man" in which Tolkien replied to Shippey's interpretations of his work, even though, Shippey writes, he speaks the same language himself. Tolkien wrote, hinting that Shippey was "nearly" (italics supplied by Shippey) always correct but that Tolkien had not had the time to tell him about his design as it "may be found in a large finished work, and the actual events or experiences as seen or felt by the waking mind in the course of actual composition [i.e. Tolkien's then-unpublished legendarium]";<ref name="Preface"/> Shippey used the phrase "Course of actual composition" as the title of the final chapter of The Road to Middle-earth.<ref name="ch 9">Template:Cite book</ref>

Shippey and Tolkien met later in 1972 when Shippey was invited for dinner by Norman Davis, who had succeeded Tolkien as the Merton Professor of English Language. When he became a Fellow of St. John's College that same year, Shippey taught Old and Middle English using Tolkien's syllabus.<ref name="Preface"/>

Shippey's first printed essay on Tolkien, "Creation from Philology in The Lord of the Rings", expanded on his 1970 lecture. In 1979, he was elected into a former position of Tolkien's, the Chair of English Language and Medieval English Literature at Leeds University. He noted that his office at Leeds, like Tolkien's, was just off Woodhouse Lane, a name that in his view Tolkien would certainly have interpreted as a trace of the woodwoses, the wild men of the woods "lurking in the hills above the Aire".<ref name="Woodwose">Template:Cite book</ref>

His first Tolkien book, The Road to Middle-earth, was published in 1982. In this he attempted to set Tolkien in the tradition of comparative philology, a discipline founded by Jacob Grimm, which he regarded as the major source of Tolkien's inspiration. In 2000, however, he published Tolkien: Author of the Century, in which he attempted also to set Tolkien in the context of his own time: "writing fantasy, but voicing in that fantasy the most pressing and most immediately relevant issues of the whole monstrous twentieth century – questions of industrialised warfare, the origin of evil, the nature of humanity". This would include writers affected by war like Kurt Vonnegut, William Golding, and George Orwell.<ref name="Preface"/> An enlarged third edition of Road to Middle-earth was published in 2005; in its preface Shippey states that he had assumed (wrongly) that the 1982 book would be his last word on the subject, and in the text he sets out his view, stated at more length in Author of the Century, that "the Lord of the Rings in particular is a war-book, also a post-war book", comparing Tolkien's writing to that of other twentieth-century authors.<ref name="Preface"/><ref name="Traumatised">Template:Cite book</ref> Road rigorously refutes what was then the long-running literary hostility to Tolkien, and explains to instinctive lovers of Lord of the Rings why they are right to like it.<ref name="Yates 1984">Template:Cite journal</ref> It has been described as "the single best thing written on Tolkien", and "the seminal monograph".<ref name="Nagy2005">Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> The book has received over 900 scholarly citations.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Both Road and Author have been often reprinted and translated. In 2000, Michael Drout and H. Wynne looked back at Shippey's books as landmarks in Tolkien research; they comment that "The real brilliance of Road was in method: Shippey would relentlessly gather small philological facts and combine them into unassailable logical propositions; part of the pleasure of reading Road lies in watching all these pieces fall into place and Shippey's larger arguments materialize out of the welter of interesting detail."<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

As an acknowledged expert on Tolkien, Shippey served for a while on the editorial board of Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review.<ref name="wsj"/> Gergely Nagy, reviewing Shippey's festschrift, wrote that Shippey "has been (and still is) an enabler for all of us in Tolkien Studies: author of the seminal The Road to Middle-earth (first published in 1983) and countless insightful articles, he is the veritable pope of the field."<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Family lifeEdit

Shippey married Susan Veale in 1966; after that marriage ended, he married Catherine Elizabeth Barton in 1993. He has three children.<ref name="encyc" /> He retired in 2008, and now lives in Dorset.<ref name="SLU CV" /><ref name="Swarthmore">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Film and televisionEdit

Shippey has appeared in several television documentaries, in which he spoke about Tolkien and his Middle-earth writings:

  • 1984: Tolkien Remembered<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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  • 1996: J.R.R.T.: A Film Portrait of J.R.R. Tolkien<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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  • 1998: An Awfully Big Adventure: J.R.R. Tolkien<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
  • 2002: Page to Screen: The Lord of the Rings<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
  • 2003: J.R.R. Tolkien: Origins of Middle-Earth<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

|CitationClass=web }}</ref>

He participated in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, for which he assisted the dialect coaches.<ref name="white"/> He was featured on all three of the documentary DVDs that accompany the special extended edition of The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, and later also that of The Hobbit film trilogy.<ref name="SLU CV"/> He summarized his experiences with the film project as follows:

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"The funny thing about interviews is you never know which bits they're going to pick. It always feels as if they sit you down, shine bright lights in your eyes, and ask you questions until you say something really silly, and that's the bit they choose. At least they didn't waterboard me. But it was good fun, and I'd cheerfully do it again."<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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PublicationsEdit

Apart from his published books, Shippey has written a large number of scholarly articles.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Books written
Translations
  • Beowulf: Translation and Commentary (Expanded Edition). Ed. Leonard Neidorf. (Uppsala Books, 2024, Template:ISBN).
Books edited

Awards and distinctionsEdit

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  • 2001 – World Fantasy Award, Special Award Professional, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century<ref name="WFA 2001">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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  • 2008 – Mythopoeic Award, Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Myth and Fantasy Studies, The Shadow-Walkers: Jacob Grimm's Mythology of the Monstrous<ref name="Myth 2008">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

|CitationClass=web }}</ref>

  • 2008 -- Festschrift edited by Andrew Wawn, Graham Johnson and John Walter, Constructing Nations, Reconstructing Myth.
  • 2014 – Festschrift edited by John Wm. Houghton, Janet Brennan Croft, Nancy Martsch, John D. Rateliff, and Robin Anne Reid, Tolkien in the New Century: Essays in Honor of Tom Shippey<ref name="Houghton Croft Martsch 2014">Template:Cite book</ref>
  • 2020 - Festschrift, edited by Eric Shane Bryan and Alaexander Ames, Literary Speech Acts of the Medieval North: Essays inspired by the works of T A Shippey,

ReferencesEdit

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External linksEdit

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