Thomas Shippey
| Tom Shippey | |
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Shippey in 2015.
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| Born |
Thomas Alan Shippey 9 September 1943 Calcutta, British India |
| Nationality | British |
| Occupation | Academic, writer |
| Known for | Tolkien scholarship |
Thomas Alan Shippey (born 9 September 1943) is a British scholar of medievalism, of medieval literature, including that of Anglo-Saxon England, and of modern fantasy and science fiction. In particular he is widely considered one of the world's leading academic scholars on the works of J. R. R. Tolkien about whom he has written several books and many scholarly papers.
Shippey was born in 1943 in Calcutta, British India, where he also spent the first years of his life. He was sent to a boarding school in England, and studied at King Edward's School in Birmingham from 1954 to 1960.
When he was 14 years old, he was lent The Hobbit. Like Tolkien, Shippey became fond of Old English, Old Norse, German and Latin, and of playing rugby.
After Shippey's graduation in the early 1960s he did not immediately start an academic career since the British economy of the time did not offer many jobs. Only in the mid-1960s did he enrol at the University of Cambridge from where he graduated with M.A. in 1968. He was awarded a PhD from Cambridge University in 1990.
In 1996, Shippey was appointed to the Walter J. Ong Chair of Humanities at Saint Louis University's College of Arts and Sciences, where he did teaching, research and publishing. He retired from there in 2008.
From 2003 to 2007, he served as the editor of the journal Studies in Medievalism and from 2003 to 2009, he was the President of the International Society for the Study of Medievalism.
Under the pseudonym of "Tom Allen" he 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.
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