“Recent Convert”, a regular contributor to the lively debate and discussion here on the Ink Desk, asked me, in a comment to my recent post on “The Philosophy of Tolkien”, what I thought of the work of Tom Shippey, one of the world’s leading Tolkien scholars. I would respond as follows:
Tom Shippey, for those who don’t know, is the author of The Road to Middle-earth and, more recently, the excellent J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. He is, in my judgement, possibly the finest Tolkien scholar alive today, in spite of the fact that he is not a Christian (as far as I know) and has a singular blind-spot about the profundity of Catholic symbolism and imagery in The Lord of the Rings.
It might seem odd to suggest that someone could be the finest of scholars of Tolkien’s masterpiece whilst being singularly blind to the fact that The Lord of the Rings is, to quote Tolkien himself, “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work”. Yet, in spite of this real Achilles heel, Shippey is so good on the linguistic dimension of Tolkien’s work, and so defiant of the “political correctness” of those literary critics who sneer at Tolkien’s achievement, that he has earned and commands the respect of all those who share his love for Middle-earth.
I feel grateful that I had the honour of meeting Shippey a few years ago. It was back in 2002 or 2003, during the exciting period when Peter Jackson’s movies of The Lord of the Rings were being released. He and I were both booked to speak at a Tolkien conference at Cleveland State University, part of the schedule of which was a non-stop continuous reading of the whole of Tolkien’s epic, with students taking it in turns, all through the night, to read for half an hour each.
Tom Shippey and I were aware of each other’s work and aware of our “religious differences” with regard to the critical reading of The Lord of the Rings. At the same time, Shippey seemed to be respectful of my work and certainly not dismissive, whereas my respect for his work was considerable, notwithstanding his failure to address the work theologically. I believe we attended each other’s talk (I certainly attended his) and a sort of Mexican stand-off ensued in which neither of us mentioned the obvious “religious differences”.
The silence was finally broken when we returned to the hotel at which we were both staying and decided, as two Englishmen in exile (Shippey was teaching at St Louis University and would return to England following his retirement in 2008), that we needed to break the ice over a pint of Guinness or two (or three) in the hotel bar. At first we played safe, talking about the Old Country and the things we missed. As the liquid loosened our loquaciousness, we proceeded to talk about rugby, for which he had a passion, and finally, and inevitably, The Lord of the Rings. I chastised him mildly and good-naturedly for his sidestepping of the religious issue in his talk and, to my surprise, he conceded readily that he did not fully understand the religious and theological aspects of the work but most certainly did not dismiss it or deride it.
After my first and sadly my only meeting with Tom Shippey, I was impressed with him as a man as much as I was impressed with him as a scholar. He had about him something of the robust masculinity of Hilaire Belloc and a disarming honesty and candour, which is all too rare in the academy.
Returning to the original question, I think highly of Tom Shippey’s work, as I think highly of Tom Shippey himself. I would recommend the man and his work to anyone.
A whole post devoted to answering my question, thanks Mr. Pearce! 😀
I’m glad to get your seal of approval on him, prior to this post I had mixed feelings about Shippey. I had heard good things about his work on Tolkien, but there were two things that kept me at bay.
One was his blindspot on the religious elements in LOTR; though I’m glad to hear he does not deride or dismiss them! And on the grounds that he simply does not understand them! Go figure. It just surprises me! I mean, we kind of take it for granted that knowledge of our faith is known and widespread, but the truth is, alot of “nons” simply don’t know much about it (and Shippey is a ‘non’ I’m pretty sure, I’ve heard it from several people, including Sandra Meisel).
The other reason was a bit more complicated. Years ago a book series came out in which Shippey was a co-author (though he used a pen name). It was historical fiction, or rather historical revisionism, about the old viking world in the era of it’s conversion. Needless to say, there was alot of revising going on there. Here the vikings were not the savage cruel barbarians we knew of, but were rather tolerant, and open minded. Yes you read that right. It is the Church on the other hand that is mean, oppressive and goes out of it’s way to crush it’s enemies. It ended up being a tale about vikings trying to get the Church to be more humane, if you can believe it! So as you can see, this soured me on Shippey quite a bit(granted I don’t know how much of it he wrote, but he was still co-author). I had figured he was in the neopagan crowd or something like that.
But your take on him seems much more positive, and seeing as how you are the scholar, and probably a wiser man than I am, I’ll take your word on the matter.
Thanks!
RC, I would make two comments:
First, I was only endorsing his Tolkien scholarship, not anything else he wrote, and asserting my positive experience of him as a man with whom I spent some enjoyable moments of conviviality.
Second, we need to be aware of when people wrote things. Shippey co-authored The Hammer and the Cross in the early 1990s and I have to hope that he had grown a little older and wiser in the ten years that intervened before I met him, and that this process has continued in the ten years since.
I also received a note from Shippey in the wake of our meeting in which he seemed to indicate a quiet sympathy for my own work on Tolkien, something that would not be expected from an anti-Christian neo-pagan. At the very least, Shippey is healthily antagonistic to postmodernism and other academic manifestations of political correctness. He’s on the side of the angels, even if he doesn’t know it!
Hello Mr. Pearce!
“First, I was only endorsing his Tolkien scholarship, not anything else he wrote”
Oh yes, I understood that! I did not mean to imply otherwise.
I see that your aware of Shippey’s old series, “The Hammer and the Cross”. Yes it was written some time ago, and I do hope he has grown since then too. It would be sad if he still held those silly and amazingly inaccurate views today.
“He’s on the side of the angels, even if he doesn’t know it!”
That’s good to hear!
Thanks for this whole post/discussion, Joseph. Because of this, I may check out some of Shippey’s work on Tolkien.
There is another 1.5 points of consideration here:
Shippey is part of Secular Academia. Joseph is part of academia as well, I know, but it’s not secular. He is blessedly free from the academic constraints of the secular sort because his academic position is with Ave Maria University, where the religious significance of any sort of research is not filtered out via policy.
Having been there a while and done that a bit, I know how impossible it is for even the slightest religious significance of literary research to be given a hearing. It is allowed only when it’s utterly unavoidable, and when it is, it’s dismissed with an attitude of “Well, of course, we have to understand that Tolkien (or whoever) was ‘influenced’ (a word always a negative connotation) by the Catholic Church.” The implication of such an attitude is: We scholars, on the other hand, are free from any such ‘influence.’ And the irony is that the truer implication is: We scholars, on the other hand, are not free to read, even to see, the religious significance of anything at all–not even our own research.
Secular academia is intellectually imprisoned, and they must pretend not to notice it. While this pretense is necessary to them, religious readers don’t understand why scholars so often seem to be “blind.” Shippey is an example, but in secular academia, his name is Legion.
I once attended a Tolkien conference at Marquette University where a scholar presented her paper on economic socialist ideals in LOTR. No mention of religion, of course. After her presentation, I pointed out to her that Tolkien was a Catholic. “Yes, I know that, of course, but I believe his socialist ideals prevailed in spite of the *influence* of the Church.”
Huh? (This response happens a lot when one listens to a secular academic.) I pointed out to her that if he said evening prayer, he said the Magnificat every day.
What, she wanted to know, was that (the Magnificat)?
I quoted a couple of lines that came from the meek and humble lips of Our Blessed Lady: He has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty … and … He has put down the mighty lifted up the lowly.
She was astonished–“Where can I find that?”
My answer: Any Bible.
Secularism shackles academia, imposes blinders that make even the most obvious things completely invisible. You always have to treat secular academics with much tolerance and take pains to avoid letting your pity show. As I said, Pearce is blessedly free from it; Shippey is not.
Dear RC,
What has been done to Shakespeare will likely be done to Tolkien on a lesser scale, maybe.
Very good point Dena!
That reminds me: Years ago I was at my local B&N and I picked up a couple of tomes on Tolkien; both must have been ‘influenced’ (hehe) by the secular mindset. Neither one went into any of the religious significance of the works, the best one got was a biography of Tolkien and Lewis which described Tolkien as fanatically religious. It called him a Catholic fundamentalist…I believe this was because it mentioned that he believed in the existance of the demonic. Seculars, where would we be without them?!
Also, I remember reading in one of those books that some communists believed LOTR supported communism. All this time Tollers was a commie, who knew?
I share your evaluation.
However, having assumed that Shippey was a Roman Catholic, becuase he taught at St Louis (in Fr Ong’s chair) I was very surprised to discover (from a comment in one of the essays in his book Roots and Branches that in fact he was not!
(I reviewed this book recently, but did not mention the above pint
http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/tom-shippey-great-tolkien-scholar.html )
I had never noticed anything in Shippey’s work that conflicted with Catholic Christianity – and had assumed this was left-out merely due to the genre withing which TAS was writing.
I do not know whether TAS is some other kind of Christian, presumably an Anglican – but I suppose he would have needed to declare this publicly at least at the time of tkaing up his chair at St Louis?