Tom Shippey

TOM SHIPPEY received his PhD from the University of Cambridge. In an academic teaching career lasting 43 years (1965-2008), he taught at six universities, including Oxford and Harvard. His first published article, more than fifty years ago, was "The Fairy-Tale Structure of Beowulf" (1969), while his first published book was Old English Verse (1972). Since then, he has published well over a hundred academic articles, and more than twenty monographs and edited collections, notably (with Andreas...See more

TOM SHIPPEY received his PhD from the University of Cambridge. In an academic teaching career lasting 43 years (1965-2008), he taught at six universities, including Oxford and Harvard. His first published article, more than fifty years ago, was "The Fairy-Tale Structure of Beowulf" (1969), while his first published book was Old English Verse (1972). Since then, he has published well over a hundred academic articles, and more than twenty monographs and edited collections, notably (with Andreas Haarder) The Critical Heritage: Beowulf (1998), and most recently, Beowulf and the North before the Vikings (2022). He also written more than 200 reviews on fantasy and science fiction for The Wall Street Journal, as well as many contributions, often on archaeology, to The London Review of Books. He is well known for books that have reached a wider community of readers outside academia, such as Laughing Shall I Die (2018) and his much-reprinted and often-translated books on Tolkien, The Road to Middle-earth (1981) and J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (2000). See less