61-523: The History of The Lord of the Rings is a four-volume work by Christopher Tolkien published between 1988 and 1992 that documents his father's process of constructing The Lord of the Rings . The History is also numbered as volumes six to nine of The History of Middle-earth ("HoME"). The volumes are: The first volume of The History encompasses three early phases of composition, including what Tolkien later called "the crucial chapter" which sets up
122-548: 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 1979, he was elected to the Chair of English Language and Medieval English Literature at Leeds University , a post once held by Tolkien. In 1996, after 14 years at Leeds, Shippey
183-431: 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.. 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
244-535: A draft of the Drowning of Anadûnê (that led to Akallabêth ), and the only extant account of Tolkien's constructed language Adûnaic . Some paperback editions of the fourth volume, retitled The End of the Third Age , include only the materials that relate to The Lord of the Rings . The original idea was to release The History of The Lord of the Rings in three volumes, not four. When The Treason of Isengard
305-441: A dream that his father was anxiously searching for something, and that he had "realized in horror that it was The Silmarillion ." In Ferré's view, he should be thought of as "a writer in his own right, and not only as an 'editor' of his father's manuscripts". He gives two reasons for this: that The Silmarillion reveals his own writing style and "the choices he made in 'constructing'" the narrative; and that he had to devise parts of
366-481: A fair draft was written over a half-erased first draft, and names of characters routinely changed between the beginning and the end of the same draft. He explained: By the time of my father's death the amount of writing in existence on the subject of the Three Ages was huge in quantity (since it extended over a lifetime), disordered, more full of beginnings than of ends, and varying in content from heroic verse in
427-584: A further festschrift , Tolkien in the New Century , 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. Shippey , came out in 2020, edited by Eric Bryan and Alexander Ames. 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
488-676: A lecture on "Tolkien as philologist" at a Tolkien day organised by the Adult Education Department at the University of Birmingham . Joy Hill, Tolkien's private secretary, was in the audience and afterward, she asked him for the script, for Tolkien to read. On 13 April 1970, Shippey received a letter from Tolkien in response; he records that it took him 30 years to decode the "specialised politeness-language of Old Western Man" in which Tolkien replied to Shippey's interpretations of his work, even though, Shippey writes, he speaks
549-461: A lecturer and tutor in English language at New College, Oxford in 1963. In 1967 his father named him as his literary executor, and more specifically as his co-author of The Silmarillion . After his father's death in 1973, he took a large quantity of legendarium manuscripts to his Oxfordshire home, where he converted a barn into a workspace. He and the young Guy Gavriel Kay started work on
610-503: A philologist, demonstrated in his editing of those medieval works, to research, collate, edit, and comment on his father's Middle-earth writings exactly as if they were real-world legends. The effect is both to frame his father's works and to insert himself as a narrator. They have further noted that his additions to The Silmarillion , such as to fill in gaps, and his composition of the text in his own literary style, place him as an author as well as an editor of that book. Christopher Tolkien
671-503: 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
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#1732776033933732-547: A relatively complete stage between 1951 and 1957, but then abandoned. This was one of his father's earliest stories, its first version dating back to 1918; several versions are published in The Silmarillion , Unfinished Tales , and The History of Middle-earth . The Children of Húrin is a synthesis of these and other sources. It, along with Beren and Lúthien , published in 2017, and The Fall of Gondolin , published in 2018, constituted what J. R. R. Tolkien called
793-473: Is a stumbling-block and a source of much misapprehension." In the same foreword, while rebuffing Helms but without explaining why Helms's opinion was wrong, Christopher Tolkien admitted that the wisdom of publishing The Silmarillion with (unlike The Lord of the Rings ) no frame story , "no suggestion of what it is and how (within the imagined world) it came to be", was "certainly debatable". He added "This I now think to have been an error." He noted, too, that
854-524: The London Review of Books . 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. In 2008 he brought out a collection of articles on SF and fantasy, Hard Reading: Learning from Science Fiction, freely available from academia.edu. Shippey's interest in Tolkien began when he
915-868: The Royal Air Force in July 1943 and at the start of 1944 was sent to South Africa for flight training. He gained his "wings" as a fighter pilot and was commissioned in January 1945. He was given a posting back in England in February 1945, at Market Drayton in Shropshire. In June 1945 he switched to the Fleet Air Arm . While still in the service, he resumed his degree in April 1946; he was demobilised at
976-612: The Tolkien Estate , the entity formed to handle the business side of his father's literary legacy, and as a trustee of the Tolkien Charitable Trust. He resigned as director of the estate in 2017. Tolkien wrote a great deal of material in the Middle-earth legendarium that remained unpublished in his lifetime. He had originally intended to publish The Silmarillion alongside The Lord of the Rings in
1037-468: The ancient English alliterative metre to severe historical analysis of his own extremely difficult languages : a vast repository and labyrinth of story, of poetry , of philosophy, and of philology ... To bring it into publishable form was a task at once utterly absorbing and alarming in its responsibility toward something that is unique. Christopher and Kay produced a single-volume edition of The Silmarillion for publication in 1977. Its success led to
1098-589: The original map of Middle-earth at the end of the Third Age ; and the evolution of Cirth in an appendix. The third volume, The War of the Ring continues to the opening of the Black Gate . The last volume reaches the end of the narrative, and features the rejected "Epilogue", in which Sam answers his children's questions. It includes The Notion Club Papers (a time-travel story related to Númenor ),
1159-412: The philologist and Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey , in his book The Road to Middle-earth , was "clearly reluctant to see [ The Silmarillion ] as other than a 'late' work, even the latest work of its author", i.e. that its text owes as much to Christopher Tolkien as to his father. Ferré records that, much later, in 2012, Christopher Tolkien admitted "I had had to invent some passages", that he had had
1220-489: The "fascinating study" Sauron Defeated that were eventually deleted being the pardoning of Saruman , and an awards ceremony at the book's close. Christopher Tolkien Christopher John Reuel Tolkien (21 November 1924 – 16 January 2020) was an English and naturalised French academic editor and writer. The son of the author and academic J. R. R. Tolkien , Christopher edited 24 volumes based on his father's posthumously published work, including The Silmarillion and
1281-476: The 12-volume series The History of Middle-Earth , a task that took 45 years. He also drew the original maps for his father's fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings . Outside his father's unfinished works, Christopher edited three tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (with Nevill Coghill ) and his father's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight . Tolkien scholars have remarked that he used his skill as
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#17327760339331342-424: The 1950s, but it was rejected by his publisher. Parts of it were in a finished state when he died in 1973, but the project was incomplete. He once called his son his "chief critic and collaborator", and named him his literary executor. Christopher organised the masses of his father's unpublished writings, some of them written on odd scraps of paper half a century earlier. Much of the material was handwritten; frequently
1403-591: 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. Road rigorously refutes what was then the long-running literary hostility to Tolkien , and explains to instinctive lovers of Lord of
1464-533: The High-Elves) on the title page of each of the volumes of History of Middle-earth , written by Christopher Tolkien and describing the contents of the book. The History of The Lord of the Rings reveals much of the slow, aggregative nature of Tolkien's creativity. As Christopher Tolkien noted of the first two volumes, his father had eventually brought the story up to Rivendell , but still "without any clear conception of what lay before him". He also noted how, on
1525-769: 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
1586-558: The Rings film trilogy , for which he assisted the dialect coaches. He was featured on all three of the documentary DVDs that accompany the special extended edition of The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, and later also that of The Hobbit film trilogy . He summarized his experiences with the film project as follows: "The funny thing about interviews is you never know which bits they're going to pick. 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
1647-527: The Rings to what it had always been in Tolkien's mind: Silmarillion -centred. Noad adds that "The whole series of The History of Middle-earth is a tremendous achievement and makes a worthy and enduring testament to one man's creative endeavours and to another's explicatory devotion. It reveals far more about Tolkien's invented world than any of his readers in pre- Silmarillion days could ever have imagined or hoped for." In April 2007, he published The Children of Húrin , whose story his father had brought to
1708-413: 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
1769-403: The Rings ", expanded on his 1970 lecture. In 1979, he was elected into a former position of Tolkien's, the Chair of English Language and Medieval English Literature at Leeds University . He noted that his office at Leeds, like Tolkien's, was just off Woodhouse Lane, a name that in his view Tolkien would certainly have interpreted as a trace of the woodwoses , the wild men of the woods "lurking in
1830-678: The Rings . His father invited him to join the Inklings , a literary discussion group, when Christopher was 21 years old. His father called this "a quite unprecedented honour". He became a lecturer in English language at St Catherine's Society, Oxford in 1954. Away from his father's writings, he published The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise : "Translated from the Icelandic with Introduction, Notes and Appendices by Christopher Tolkien" in 1960. Later, he followed in his father's footsteps, becoming
1891-574: The Third Age . The title The Return of the Shadow was a discarded title for Volume 1. Three of the titles of the volumes of The History of The Lord of the Rings were also used as book titles for the seven-volume edition of The Lord of the Rings : The Treason of Isengard for Book 3, The War of the Ring for Book 5, and The End of the Third Age for Book 6. There is an inscription in Fëanorian characters ( Tengwar , an alphabet Tolkien devised for
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1952-725: The age of 95, in Draguignan , Var , France. Tom Shippey 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
2013-451: The book", noting that J. R. R. Tolkien had foreseen in a 1963 letter that the presentation of the stories "will need a lot of work ... the legends have to be worked over ... and made consistent ... and they have to be given some progressive shape." In 1981, the scholar of literature Randel Helms , taking that statement as definitive of Christopher Tolkien's editorial, indeed authorial, intentions: stated in terms that " The Silmarillion in
2074-624: The central plot, " The Shadow of the Past ". It finishes at the point where the Company of the Ring enter the Mines of Moria . The second volume continues to the meeting with Théoden king of Rohan , and includes the invention and evolution of Lothlórien and Galadriel ; plans for Frodo and Sam 's progress to Mordor ; the creation and development of Treebeard , the Ents , and Fangorn; discussions of
2135-637: 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
2196-592: The documents, discovering by 1975 how complex the task was likely to be. In September 1975 he resigned from New College to work exclusively on editing his father's writings. He moved to France and continued this task for 45 years. In all, he edited and published 24 volumes of his father's writings, most of them to do with the Middle-earth legendarium. In 2016 Christopher won a Bodley Medal , an award that recognises outstanding contributions to literature, culture, science, and communication. He served as chairman of
2257-539: The end of that year. He took his B.A. in 1948, and his B.Litt. in 1953 under the philologist Gabriel Turville-Petre . Tolkien was for a long time part of the critical audience for his father's fiction, first as a child listening to tales of Bilbo Baggins (published as The Hobbit ), and then as a teenager and young adult offering feedback on The Lord of the Rings throughout its 15-year gestation. He also redrew his father's working maps for inclusion in The Lord of
2318-474: The figures also being Boffins and Bolgers, as well as Tooks. Only with the chapter "The Breaking of the Fellowship" did fluency finally arrive for Tolkien, his son recording how chapters were suddenly "achieved with far greater facility than any previous part of the story". Thereafter Tolkien's problem was rather one of selecting between alternative accounts, so as to produce the best effect – two episodes in
2379-446: The films, saying: "They gutted the book, making an action film for 15 to 25-year-olds." In 2008 he commenced legal proceedings against New Line Cinema , which he claimed owed his family £80 million in unpaid royalties. In September 2009, he and New Line reached an undisclosed settlement, and he withdrew his legal objection to The Hobbit films. Tolkien was married twice. He had two sons and one daughter. His first marriage in 1951
2440-524: The hills above the Aire ". 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, i n which he attempted also to set Tolkien in the context of his own time: "writing fantasy, but voicing in that fantasy
2501-658: The materials used could not be relied upon as history, only as indications of a shared mindset. 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
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2562-428: 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 . An enlarged third edition of Road to Middle-earth was published in 2005; in its preface Shippey states that he had assumed (wrongly) that
2623-555: The phrase "Course of actual composition" as the title of the final chapter of The Road to Middle-earth . 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. Shippey's first printed essay on Tolkien, "Creation from Philology in The Lord of
2684-518: The process of editing his father's unpublished writings, "the real nature of Christopher Tolkien's work was a matter of debate, before a more simplistic consensus began to prevail." Christopher Tolkien explained in The Silmarillion 's foreword in 1977 "I set myself therefore to work out a single text, selecting and arranging in such a way as seemed to me to produce the most coherent and internally self-consistent narrative." In Ferré's opinion, "This choice remains one of his [most] distinctive marks on
2745-637: 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). 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 . For ten years he reviewed science fiction for The Wall Street Journal , and still contributes literary reviews to
2806-562: The publication of Unfinished Tales in 1980, and then to the far larger project of The History of Middle-earth in 12 volumes between 1983 and 1996. Most of the original source-texts that Christopher used to construct The Silmarillion were published in this way. Charles Noad comments that the 12-volume History had done something that a putative single-volume edition of The Silmarillion with embedded commentary could not have achieved: it had changed people's perspective on Tolkien's Middle-earth writings, from being centred on The Lord of
2867-415: The same language himself. Tolkien wrote, hinting that Shippey was " nearly " (italics supplied by Shippey) always correct but that Tolkien had not had the time to tell him about his design as it " may be found in a large finished work, and the actual events or experiences as seen or felt by the waking mind in the course of actual composition [i.e. Tolkien's then-unpublished legendarium ]"; Shippey used
2928-499: The same way that his editing of The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays presented his father's essays as scholarly work. In 2001 Christopher Tolkien expressed doubts over The Lord of the Rings film trilogy directed by Peter Jackson , questioning the viability of a film interpretation that retained the essence of the work, but stressed that this was just his opinion. In a 2012 interview with Le Monde , he criticised
2989-616: The seminal The Road to Middle-earth (first published in 1983) and countless insightful articles, he is the veritable pope of the field." Shippey married Susan Veale in 1966; after that marriage ended, he married Catherine Elizabeth Barton in 1993. He has three children. He retired in 2008, and now lives in Dorset . 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
3050-415: The shape that we have it [a single-volume narrative] is the invention of the son not the father". Christopher Tolkien disagreed, stating in the foreword to the 1983 The Book of Lost Tales , that the outcome of his work had been "to add a further dimension of obscurity to The Silmarillion , ... about the age of the work ... and about the degree of editorial intrusion and manipulation (or even invention),
3111-410: The story, both to fill gaps and when "threads were impossible to weave together". Christopher Tolkien's editing of the 12 volumes of The History of Middle-earth , using his skill as a philologist, created an editorial frame for his father's legendarium, and for the books derived from it. Ferré comments that this presented his father's writings as historical, a real set of legends from the past, in just
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#17327760339333172-518: The three "Great Tales" of the "Elder Days". Christopher edited some works by his father that were unconnected to the Middle-earth legendarium. The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún appeared in May 2009, a verse retelling of the Norse Völsung cycle, followed by The Fall of Arthur in May 2013, and by Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary in May 2014. Vincent Ferré comments that early in
3233-440: The wake of a dispute surrounding the making of The Lord of the Rings film trilogy , he is said to have disapproved of the views of his son Simon. He felt that The Lord of the Rings was "peculiarly unsuitable for transformation into visual dramatic form", whilst his son became involved as an advisor with the series. They later reconciled, and Simon dedicated one of his novels to his father. Tolkien died on 16 January 2020, at
3294-456: The way, his father could get caught up in a "spider's web of argumentation" – what Tom Shippey described as getting "bogged down in sometimes strikingly unnecessary webs of minor causation". Thus (for example) the character eventually known as Pippin Took was, in a series of rewriting and of deleted adventures, variously known as Odo, Frodo, Folco, Faramond, Peregrin, Hamilcar, Fredegar, and Olo –
3355-559: The work into three volumes, each containing two books; the appendices were included in the third. The titles proposed by Tolkien for the six books were: Book 1, The First Journey or The Ring Sets Out ; Book 2, The Journey of the Nine Companions or The Ring Goes South ; Book 3, The Treason of Isengard ; Book 4, The Journey of the Ring-Bearers or The Ring Goes East ; Book 5, The War of the Ring ; and Book 6, The End of
3416-578: 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)." On 11 November 1969, he delivered
3477-536: 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 been 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 in 2005 The Shadow-walkers: Jacob Grimm's Mythology of
3538-692: Was born on 21 November 1924 in Leeds , England, the third of four children and the youngest son of J. R. R. and Edith Tolkien ( née Bratt). He was educated at the Dragon School in Oxford , and later at the Roman Catholic Oratory School near Reading . He won a place to study English at Trinity College, Oxford , still aged 17, but after a year and a half there he received his call-up papers for military service. He joined
3599-490: Was first published in paperback, Volume 8 was to be called Sauron Defeated and was to be the last volume. Some information on the appendices and a soon-abandoned sequel to the novel can be found in volume 12, The Peoples of Middle-earth . The titles of the volumes derive from discarded titles for the separate books of The Lord of the Rings . J. R. R. Tolkien conceived that novel as a single volume structured into six "books" plus extensive appendices, but his publisher split
3660-665: 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 . Gergely Nagy , reviewing Shippey's festschrift , wrote that Shippey "has been (and still is) an enabler for all of us in Tolkien Studies: author of
3721-544: Was to the sculptor Faith Lucy Tilly Faulconbridge (1928–2017). They separated in 1964, and divorced in 1967. Her work is featured in the National Portrait Gallery . Their son Simon Mario Reuel Tolkien is a barrister and novelist. He married Baillie Klass in 1967; they had two children, Adam and Rachel. In 1975 they moved to the south of France, where she edited her father-in-law's The Father Christmas Letters for posthumous publication. In
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