Thomas Alan Shippey (born 9 September 1943)[1] is a British medievalist, a retired scholar of Middle and Old English literature as well as of modern fantasy and science fiction.

[7] He participated in the creation of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, assisting the dialect coaches.

[11][12][9] 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.

[13] 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.

[14] He has published over 160 books and articles,[15] and has edited or co-edited scholarly collections such as the 1998 Beowulf: The Critical Heritage[16] and in 2005 The Shadow-walkers: Jacob Grimm's Mythology of the Monstrous.

[20][21] 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..[22] 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 as history, only as indications of a shared mindset.

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,[2] while another volume of essays by former colleagues and students, Literary Speech Acts of the Medieval North: essays inspired by the works of T.A.

[24] 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.

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".

[10] An enlarged third edition of Road to Middle-earth was published in 2005; in its preface Shippey states that he had assumed (wrongly) that the 1982 book would be his last word on the subject, and in the text he sets out his view, stated at more length in Author of the Century, that "the Lord of the Rings in particular is a war-book, also a post-war book", comparing Tolkien's writing to that of other twentieth-century authors.

[10][31] 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.

[12][37] Shippey has appeared in several television documentaries, in which he spoke about Tolkien and his Middle-earth writings: He participated in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, for which he assisted the dialect coaches.

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.