Wednesday, December 19, 2001
By Colleen Carroll
Of The Post-Dispatch

SLU professor is a lord of "the Rings"

A ghost is chasing Tom Shippey. Or perhaps, Tom Shippey is chasing a ghost.

Shippey, an English professor at St. Louis University who lives in University City, has been haunted since he first encountered a certain cantankerous Oxford don as a young teen-ager in Birmingham, England. Poring over the pages of "The Hobbit," Shippey uncovered the mythical world of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, the celebrated author 50 years his senior who grew up in the same metropolis, tackled for the same rugby team and attended the same school as Shippey.

Back then, the similarities were already striking. Shippey was a budding linguist who, like Tolkien, had taught himself Old English. But the parallels had only begun to take shape.

Over the course of the next 45 years, Shippey would take a career path startlingly similar to Tolkien's, exchanging letters and eventually meeting Tolkien. His connections with the man behind Middle Earth have inspired Shippey, 58, to write several books about his good-natured doppleganger and become a leading authority on Tolkien's work.

"I felt that somebody ought to speak up for him," said Shippey, who moved to St. Louis from Britain in 1993 to accept the Walter J. Ong Chair of Humanities at SLU.

When Shippey saw literary critics analyzing Tolkien in light of their own ideas - without giving due consideration to his distinctively English sensibilities and love of languages - Shippey decided to take up Tolkien's cause. The choice made sense. Not only were Tolkien and Shippey from the same area of central England, but Shippey taught the same syllabus that Tolkien did as a professor at Oxford University, and held the same chair - fighting many of the same academic battles - as Tolkien did at Leeds University. Shippey met Tolkien just a year before the author's death in 1973 and ran into him several times when they were living near each other in Oxford.

Shippey looks the part of a Tolkien contemporary when he sports his gray tweed coat and red cap, pulled down to mischievously twinkling eyes. When he speaks of Tolkien - in a crisp English accent matched by even crisper wit - he exudes the respect and delight of an old friend.

"He was like Gandalf," Shippey said, comparing the author to the beloved, curmudgeonly wizard in "The Lord of the Rings." "He was much more intelligent than people seem to think now, and much subtler. He didn't try to make his conversation easy for you."

Shippey's most recent book, "J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century," follows his 1983 scholarly tome on Tolkien, "The Road to Middle-earth," by arguing for Tolkien's place among the best modern writers. His expertise has given him Hollywood berth: Director Peter Jackson sought Shippey's help to perfect pronunciation in Jackson's much-hyped "The Fellowship of the Ring," the first film in a trilogy destined to introduce Tolkien's elves, ents and orcs to a new generation.

While waiting to see a sneak preview of the film earlier this month at Des Peres 14 Cine in west St. Louis County, Shippey recalled the first time he made contact with Tolkien. Shippey was speaking at a Tolkien conference in 1970, and conference attendees were fleeing in droves as literary experts droned on, analyzing Tolkien's work from the perspectives of "sociology, psychology and some other damn-ology. I'd have fled as well if I hadn't been on the platform."

After Shippey gave his speech - which put Tolkien's work in the context of his fascination with philology, or the study of languages - Tolkien's secretary approached Shippey. She complimented him, took his copy of the speech and his address, and Shippey soon received a letter from Tolkien himself.

"He was very pleased," Shippey said.

In the letter, which Shippey has saved for 31 years, Tolkien discussed his work and corrected the erroneous notion that he had a grand design in mind before he wrote his epic. Two years later, after Shippey took over Tolkien's post as a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, the pair met for dinner. Tolkien died the next year.

Six years after Tolkien's death, Shippey took over Tolkien's old post at Leeds University and continued to study Tolkien's work. Though Tolkien's books have been translated into more than 30 languages and sold many millions of copies, their epic grandeur, invented languages and moral absolutes have repelled critics who favor detached irony and literary realism.

"The standard response (of characters in a modern novel) is to sort of shrug your shoulders and walk away," Shippey said. For the characters in Tolkien's tales, "withdrawl is not only immoral, it's also disastrous."

Shippey's work has drawn the wrath of some reviewers, including one particularly irate critic in The Guardian of London, who called his latest book "a belligerently argued piece of fan-magazine polemic."

Yet most reviewers have praised Shippey's erudition and scholarship. Many scholars regard him as the pre-eminent Tolkien authority, even if they do not regard Tolkien as a pre-eminent 20th-century author.

"Tom is a perfect person" to write about Tolkien, said Kathleen Verduin, an English professor at Hope College in Holland, Mich., who has worked with Shippey on an academic journal about medievalism. "He's an excellent scholar. He's got international connections and an international reputation."

Shippey's reputation persuaded Stefan Hall, 28, to come to SLU for his English doctorate. Hall is one of about a dozen students who join Shippey and English professor Paul Acker to read 1,000-year-old sagas in Old Norse - over beers, for fun.

"He can be intimidating because he knows more than anyone else," Hall said. "After a while, you realize he's not intimidating, he's cool."

Shippey's linguistic mastery and rebel persona embolden him as a Tolkien champion within the literary establishment and on the national media circuit. Those qualities remind many of Shippey's famous predecessor in philology.

Aaron Belz, 30, a doctoral student at SLU, said it takes a scholar like Shippey to defend Tolkien.

"He's esteemed enough that he can take those chances now," Belz said. "He's just who he is. And that's signature Shippey."