Thomas Alan Shippey (born 9 September 1943) 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 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".

Shippey's education and academic career have repeatedly crossed paths with 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 two Mythopoeic Awards and a World Fantasy Award.

Contents

• 1 Life
• 2 Tolkien scholarship
• 3 Modern fantasy and science fiction
• 4 Film and television
• 5 Bibliography
• 6 Awards and distinctions
• 7 References
• 8 External links

Life

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. He was sent to a boarding school in Scotland, and studied at King Edward's School in Birmingham from 1954 to 1960.

Like J. R. R. Tolkien, Shippey became fond of Old English, Old Norse, German and Latin, and of playing rugby. He gained a B.A. from Queens' College, Cambridge in 1964, his M.A. in 1968, and a PhD in 1970. 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. In 1979, he was elected to the Chair of English Language and Medieval English Literature at Leeds University, a post once held by Tolkien. 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. He was a visiting professor at Harvard University, the University of Texas, and Signum University. He has published over 160 books and articles. He married Susan Veale in 1966; after that marriage ended, he married Catherine Elizabeth Barton in 1993. He has three children. He retired in 2008, and now lives in Dorset. He continues his research as an honorary research fellow at the University of Winchester. 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 festschrift.

Tolkien scholarship

Shippey's interest in Tolkien began when he was 14 years old and was lent a copy of The Hobbit. 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)."

In late 1969 or early 1970, Shippey wrote his first academic work on Tolkien. He then delivered a speech at a Tolkien day organised by a student *ociation. This lecture, "Tolkien as philologist" became influential for Shippey's view of Tolkien. 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 seemingly formal letter from Tolkien; he records that it took him 30 years to decode the "specialised politeness-language of Old Western Man" in which Tolkien replies to Shippey's interpretations of his work, even though, Shippey writes, he speaks the same language himself. Tolkien wrote, hinting with invisible italics, 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 "; Shippey used the phrase "Course of actual composition" as the *le of the final chapter of The Road to Middle-earth.

Shippey and Tolkien first met in 1972. 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, Shippey taught Old and Middle English using Tolkien's syllabus.

Shippey's first printed essay, "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".

His first book, The Road to Middle-earth, was published in 1982. At this time, Shippey shifted from regarding Tolkien as a philologist to a "traumatised author" as he called it. This would include writers affected by war like Kurt Vonnegut and William Golding. An enlarged third edition was published in 2005; in its preface he states that he had *umed that the 1982 book would be his last word on the subject. The book 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. It has been described as "the single best thing written on Tolkien", and "the seminal monograph". The book has received over 800 scholarly citations.

As an acknowledged expert on Tolkien, Shippey serves on the editorial board of Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review.

Modern fantasy and science fiction

Under the pseudonym of "Tom Allen", Shippey has written two stories that were published in anthologies edited by Peter Weston. The first published was the fantasy story "King, Dragon" in Andromeda 2 in 1977; the second was the science fiction novelette "Not Absolute" in Andromeda 3 in 1978.

Under the pseudonym of "John Holm", he is 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). For Harrison's 1984 West of Eden, Shippey helped with the constructed language, Yilanè.

He has edited both The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories, and The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories. He reviews science fiction for The Wall Street Journal, and contributes literary reviews to the London Review of Books.In 2009, he wrote a scholarly 21-page introduction to Flights of Eagles, a collection of James Blish's works. He has given many invited lectures on Tolkien and other topics.

Film and television

Shippey appeared in several television do*entaries. These included:

• 1984: Tolkien Remembered
• 1996: J.R.R.T.: A Film Portrait of J.R.R. Tolkien
• 1998: An Awfully Big Adventure: J.R.R. Tolkien
• 2001: Beyond the Movie: The Fellowship of the Ring
• 2002: Page to Screen: The Lord of the Rings
• 2003: J.R.R. Tolkien: Origins of Middle-Earth

He also participated in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, for which he *isted the dialect coaches. He was featured on all three of the do*entary DVDs that accompany the special extended edition of The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, and later also that of The Hobbit film trilogy. 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."

Bibliography

• Beowulf. Arnold's Studies in English Literature series (London: Edward Arnold, 1978 ISBN:978-0-71316-147-2).
• Hard Reading: Learning from Science Fiction (Liverpool University Press, 2016 ISBN:978-1-78138-261-5).
• J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (London: HarperCollins, 2001 ISBN:978-0-26110-401-3).
• Laughing Shall I Die: Lives and Deaths of the Great Vikings (Reaktion Books, 2018, ISBN:978-1-780239-09-5)
• Literary Genius: 25 Cl*ic Writers Who Define English & American Literature, Essayist (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2007) (Illustrated by Barry Moser ISBN:978-1-58988-035-1).
• Old English Verse (London: Hutchinson, 1972)
• Poems of Wisdom and Learning in Old English (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1976; 2nd ed., 1977 ISBN:0-091-11030-0).
• Roots and Branches: Selected Papers on Tolkien (Zurich and Berne: Walking Tree Publishers, Cormarë Series 11, 2007, ISBN:978-3-905703-05-4)
• The Road to Middle-earth (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983), 2nd ed. (London: HarperCollins, 1993), Revised and Expanded edition (London: HarperCollins, 2005 ISBN:978-0-26110-275-0).

• Beowulf: The Critical Heritage, Editor, with Andreas Haarder (New York: Routledge, 1998 ISBN:978-1-13800-910-3).
• Fictional Space: Essays on Contemporary Science Fiction, Editor (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991, ISBN:0-631-17129-0).
• Medievalism in the Modern World: Essays in Honour of Leslie J. Workman. Ed. Richard Utz and Tom Shippey (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), ISBN:2-503-50166-4.
• Medievalism in the Modern World: Essays in Honour of Leslie Workman, editor, with Richard Utz (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998 OCLC:40884815).
• Old English Philology: Studies in Honour of R.D. Fulk, Editor, with Leonard Neidorf and Rafael J. Pascual (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2016 ISBN:978-1-84384-438-9).
• The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories, Editor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994 ISBN:0-19-214216-X).
• The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories, Editor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, ISBN:0-19-214204-6).
• The Shadow-Walkers: Jacob Grimm's Mythology of the Monstrous, Editor (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005 ISBN:978-2-50352-094-0).

Awards and distinctions

• 1984 – Mythopoeic Award, Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Inkling Studies, The Road to Middle-earth
• 2001 – Mythopoeic Award, Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Inkling Studies, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century
• 2001 – World Fantasy Award, Special Award Professional, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century
• 2004 – The One Ring Celebration Award, Best Tolkien based Lecture presented at an Academic Function, History in Words, Tolkien's Ruling P*ion
• 2006 – The One Ring Celebration Award, Best Lecture/Paper
• 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

References

External links

• Tom Shippey at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• T.A. Shippey at Library of Congress Authorities – with 22 catalogue records
• Tom Shippey at the London Review of Books, 46 pieces as of August 2021