Early 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. Like
J. R. R. Tolkien, Shippey became fond of
Old English,
Old Norse, German and
Latin, and of playing
rugby.
Medievalist 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 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 has published over 160 books and articles, and has edited or co-edited scholarly collections such as the 1998
Beowulf: The Critical Heritage and in 2005 ''The Shadow-walkers: Jacob Grimm's Mythology of the Monstrous
. Among several influential articles on the Old English poem Beowulf are an analysis of its principles of conversation, 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, 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. 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.. See further "Vikings: Legend, History, Mindset", online at academia.edu Since his retirement and his return to England, he has continued his research. 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,
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. 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). Shippey has edited both
The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories, and
The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories. and still contributes literary reviews to the
London Review of Books. He has given many invited lectures on Tolkien and other topics. Shippey comments on his interest in Tolkien that 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. 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. 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.
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. It has been described as "the single best thing written on Tolkien", and "the seminal monograph". The book has received over 900 scholarly citations. 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." As an acknowledged expert on Tolkien, Shippey served for a while on the editorial board of
Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review.
Family life Shippey married Susan Veale in 1966; after that marriage ended, he married Catherine Elizabeth Barton in 1993. He has three children. == Film and television ==