Thomas Alan Shippey (born 9 September 1943)[1] 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[2] 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".[3]
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.
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.[1][8][9] He studied at King Edward's School in Birmingham from 1954 to 1960.[10]
He has published over 160 books and articles,[15] and has edited or co-edited scholarly collections such as the 1998 Beowulf: The Critical Heritage[16] and in 2005 The Shadow-walkers: Jacob Grimm's Mythology of the Monstrous.[17] Among several influential articles on the Old English poem Beowulf are an analysis of its principles of conversation,[18] 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,[19] 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.[20][21] 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..[22] 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.[22] See further "Vikings: Legend, History, Mindset", online at academia.edu
Since his retirement and his return to England, he has continued his research[23] 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,[2] 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.[24]
Modern fantasy and science fiction
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.[25]
Shippey has edited both The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories, and The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories.[27] For ten years he reviewed science fiction for The Wall Street Journal,[27] and still contributes literary reviews to the London Review of Books.[12]
In 2009, he wrote a scholarly 21-page introduction to Flights of Eagles, a collection of James Blish's works.[28] He has given many invited lectures on Tolkien and other topics.[12] In 2008 he brought out a collection of articles on SF and fantasy, Hard Reading: Learning from Science Fiction, freely available from academia.edu.
Shippey's interest in Tolkien began when he was 14 years old and was lent a copy of The Hobbit.[11] Shippey comments on his interest in Tolkien that
Purely by accident, I followed in Tolkien's footsteps in several respects: as a schoolboy (we both went to King Edward's School, Birmingham), as rugby player (we both played for Old Edwardians), as a teacher at Oxford (I taught Old English for seven years at St. John's College, just overlapping with Tolkien's last years of retirement), and as Professor of English Language at Leeds (where I inherited Tolkien's chair and syllabus)."[12]
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.[29]
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]";[10] Shippey used the phrase "Course of actual composition" as the title of the final chapter of The Road to Middle-earth.[30]
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.[10]
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".[29]
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.[10] 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.[10][31]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.[32] It has been described as "the single best thing written on Tolkien", and "the seminal monograph".[3][33] The book has received over 900 scholarly citations.[34] 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."[35]
As an acknowledged expert on Tolkien, Shippey served for a while on the editorial board of Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review.[27]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."[36]
Family life
Shippey married Susan Veale in 1966; after that marriage ended, he married Catherine Elizabeth Barton in 1993. He has three children.[9] He retired in 2008, and now lives in Dorset.[12][37]
Film and television
Shippey has appeared in several television documentaries, in which he spoke about Tolkien and his Middle-earth writings:
He participated in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, for which he assisted the dialect coaches.[11] 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.[12] He summarized his experiences with the film project as follows:
"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."[43]
Publications
Apart from his published books, Shippey has written a large number of scholarly articles.[44]
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,
References
^ abcClute, John (12 August 2013). "Shippey, Tom". The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (3rd online ed.). Retrieved 22 October 2013.
^Shippey, Tom (1993). "Principles of Conversation in Beowulf". In Fox, Gwyneth; Hoey, Michael; Sinclair, John M. (eds.). Techniques of Description. London: Routledge. ISBN978-0-203-16809-7.
^Shippey, Tom (2012). "Historical Fiction and the Post-Imperial Arthur". In Fulton, Helen (ed.). A Companion to Arthurian Literature. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN978-1-4051-5789-6.
^ abLönnroth, Lars (2019). "Laughing Shall I Die. Lives and Deaths of the Great Vikings by Tom Shippey". Saga-Book. 43: 158–160. JSTOR48617225.
^See uppsalabooks.com, which lists his video appearances on social media.
^Bryan, Eric; Ames, Alexander (2020). Literary Speech Acts of the Medieval North: Essays inspired by the works of T.A. Shippey. Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies. ISBN978-0-86698-610-6.
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