About Us

Tom Shippey is the Creative Director of Uppsala Books. He obtained all his degrees, BA, MA, PhD, from the University of Cambridge. In an academic teaching career lasting 43 years (1965-2008) he taught at six universities, including Oxford, Harvard, and St. Louis. Since “retirement” in 2008 he has continued to publish, and is in demand for lectures both in person and via Zoom, as well as podcasts. His YouTube video, “Five Great Viking Deaths,” published on the Epic History channel (January 2021), has now been seen by more than three million viewers.

His first published article, more than fifty years ago in 1969, was “The Fairy-Tale Structure of Beowulf,” while his first published book was Old English Verse, in 1972. Since then he has published well over a hundred academic articles, and more than twenty monographs, edited and co-edited collections, notably (with Andreas Haarder) The Critical Heritage: Beowulf (1998) and most recently, Beowulf and the North before the Vikings (2022).

A feature of his work has been the urge to reach out to the wider community of readers outside academia, as in his much-reprinted and often-translated books on Tolkien, The Road to Middle-earth (1981) and J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (2000), and further including The Shadow-walkers (2005, edited collection on monsters) and Laughing Shall I Die (2018, monograph on Vikings).

He has also written more than 200 reviews on fantasy and science fiction for The Wall Street Journal, as well as many contributions, often on archaeology, to The London Review of Books. Many lectures and podcasts featuring Shippey are available on YouTube. His work often bridges medieval studies and modern fiction, and also brings together the academic world and the much wider community of interested readers.