Tom Shippey

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.

Since his retirement and his return to England, he has continued his research as an honorary research fellow at the University of Winchester.

Among his research on the Old English poem Beowulf is an analysis of its principles of conversation, and 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.

He has also written on Arthurian legend, including its reworkings in medieval and modern literature.

His medieval studies have extended as far as to write a book on the lives of the great Vikings "as warriors, invaders and plunderers", exploring their "heroic mentality in the face of death and warfare".

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 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 and a World Fantasy Award.

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.

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 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 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 association at the University of Birmingham.

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.

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.

Under the pseudonym of "Tom Allen", Shippey has written two stories that were published in anthologies edited by Peter Weston.

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.

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.

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 the early 1980s, Shippey worked with Brian Aldiss with the concept of world-building in his Helliconia trilogy.

For Harrison's 1984 West of Eden, Shippey helped with the constructed language, Yilanè.

Shippey 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.

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).

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, and has edited or co-edited scholarly collections such as the 1998 Beowulf: The Critical Heritage and the 2005 Studies in Medievalism.

He has written invited forewords to books on medieval England, such as Beowulf and Other Old English Poems.

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.

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).'"