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Tom Shippey

Tom Shippey Books

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“Why could Tolkien not be more like Sir Thomas Malory, asked [Edwin] Muir, in the third Observer review of those cited above, and give us heroes and heroines like Lancelot and Guinevere, who ' knew temptation, were sometimes unfaithful to their vows,' were engagingly marked by adulterous passion? But T.H. White had already considered that paradigm, was indeed rewriting it at the same time as Tolkien in The Once and Future King; and he had seen the core of Malory's work not in romantic vice but in the human urge to murder. In White the poisonous adder that provokes the last disastrous battle is no adder but a harmless grass-snake, and the flash of the sword which brings on the two armies is not natural self-defense but natural blood-lust, creating a continuum from cruelty to animals to world wars and holocausts. Malory has to be rewritten to encompass a new view of evil.”

EvilTh WhiteTollkien
Book:J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century
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“The Old English word is wyrd, which most glossaries and dictionaries translate as ‘fate’. Tolkien knew that the etymologies of the two words were quite different, ‘fate’ coming from the Latin fari, ‘to speak’, so ‘that which has been spoken’, sc. by the gods. The Old English word derives from weorÞan, ‘to become’: it means ‘what has become, what’s over’, so among other things, ‘history’ – a historian is a wyrdwritere, a writer-down of wyrd.”

LanguageMythologyOld EnglishOld NorseWyrd
Book:J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century
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“the modern world’s cultural wallpaper. Of course, a good deal of what we think we know is just plain wrong, starting with those horned helmets, completely impractical in any kind of close combat. But more important than what’s wrong is what’s missing. There’s a question that has to be asked. How did the Vikings get away with it for so long? Or, putting it another way, what gave them their edge? An edge they maintained for almost three centuries, during which they became the scourge of Europe, from Ireland to Ukraine, from Hamburg to Gibraltar, and beyond in both directions. [from Laughing Shall I Die by Tom Shippey]”

VikingsLaughing Shall I DieTom Shippey
Author:Tom Shippey
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“The fact is that in the Vikings’ own language, Old Norse, víkingr just meant pirate, marauder. It wasn’t an ethnic label, it was a job description. And what this means for us is that if you come across headlines – as these days you very often do – which say something like ‘Vikings! Not just raiders and looters any more!’ then the headlines are wrong. If people weren’t raiding and looting (and land-grabbing, and collecting protection money), then they had stopped being Vikings. They were just Scandinavians. But while most Vikings were Scandinavians, most Scandinavians definitely weren’t Vikings, not even part-time. The two groups should not be confused, not even with the aim of making ‘the history of the Vikings’ look nicer.”

VikingsLaughing Shall I DieTom Shippey
Author:Tom Shippey
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“Sarumans of the real world rule by deluding their followers with images of a technological Paradise in the future, a modernist Utopia; but what one often gets (and this has become only more relevant since Tolkien wrote and since he died) are the blasted landscapes of Eastern Europe, strip-mined, polluted, and even radioactive.”

TechnologyLord Of The RingsTolkienSaruman
Book:J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century
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“The cry that 'fantasy is escapist' compared to the novel is only an echo of the older cry that novels are 'escapist' compared with biography, and to both cries one should make the same answer: that freedom to invent outweighs loyalty to mere happenstance, the accidents of history; and good readers should know how to filter a general applicability from a particular story.”

KnowsShouldStoriesAnswersFantasyNovelKnow HowCryParticularReaderMereAccidentsLoyaltyEchoesBiographiesFiltersEscapistsHappenstance
Book:The Road to Middle-earth: Revised and Expanded Edition
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