汤姆·雪培

托马斯·艾伦·希比（英语：Thomas Alan Shippey，1943年9月9日—）是一名英国学者、作家，专门研究古英语文学，以及现代的科幻与奇幻小说（例如J·R·R·托尔金的作品）。著有《J·R·R·托尔金：世纪作家》等多本著作。

生平

希比于1943年出生在英属印度加尔各答。而后他进入苏格兰的一所寄宿学校就读，1954年至1960年间进入伯明翰的爱德华国王学校就读。

他在14岁时初次阅读托尔金的小说《霍比特人》。他本身跟托尔金一样，也喜欢古英语、古挪威语、德语和拉丁语，以及打橄榄球。

20世纪60年代中期，进入剑桥大学就读；1968年获得硕士学位；1990年获得博士学位。其后，希比先后在伯明翰大学、牛津大学圣约翰学院、利兹大学和圣路易斯大学任教，2008年退休，定居于多塞特郡。

2003年至2007年间，担任《中世纪研究》杂志的编辑。2003年至2009年间，担任国际中世纪研究学会会长。此外，他也是学术期刊《托尔金研究》编辑委员会的成员。

希比也担任亚马逊电视剧《魔戒》的顾问，确保该剧内容不违背托尔金原著。

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 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 the documentary DVDs that accompany the special extended edition of the trilogy, and later also that of The Hobbit film trilogy.

Biography

Early life

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 a B.A. from Queens' College, Cambridge, in 1964, his M.A. in 1968, and a Ph.D. in 1970.

Medievalist

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 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 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 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 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