Tom Shippey

1 month ago | lrb.co.uk | Tom Shippey

THE​ MERCIAN CHRONICLES completes a trilogy by Max Adams that began with The King in the North, centred on King Oswald of Northumbria (r. 634-42), and went on to Ælfred’s Britain, about King Ælfred of Wessex (r. 871-99). Its focus is King Offa (r. 757-96) and thus it helps to fill the chronological gap. There is, however, a major difference between this and the earlier volumes. Adams’s title is deliberately ironic.

Dec 6, 2024 | wsj.com | Tom Shippey

The life of Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1340-1400), often labeled “the father of English poetry,” ought to be an open book: He is mentioned almost 500 times in contemporary records, far more than Shakespeare two centuries later. The annoying thing for us today is that these records all but invariably refer to him not as a poet but as a busy and high-ranking bureaucrat.

Oct 30, 2024 | lrb.co.uk | James Belich |Tom Shippey

The notion​ that human history is determined at bottom by natural forces and non-human factors seems to be an idea whose time has come. In Prisoners of Geography (2015), Tim Marshall argued that the fate of nations depends on their rivers and mountains, frontiers and coastlines. In The Earth Transformed (2023), Peter Frankopan added climate to the list: drought in Central Asia caused the fall of empires in Europe, and the Little Ice Age did the same for the Ming dynasty in China.

Dec 20, 2023 | lrb.co.uk | Jonathan Sumption |Tom Shippey

There​ can be no doubt about the scale of Jonathan Sumption’s achievement in his history of the Hundred Years War. Five massive volumes, published between 1990 and this year, each more than six hundred pages of narrative and notes. Together, they total nearly four thousand pages, not counting the bibliographies, with their ever expanding lists of secondary contributions as well as primary sources in Latin, French, Middle English, Dutch, Catalan and Portuguese.

Dec 13, 2023 | artofmanliness.com | Kate McKay |Tom Shippey |Chris’ page

Virtue ethics is an approach to life, a framework for developing character and making moral decisions. To learn about virtue ethics, you could read a philosophical treatise by Aristotle. Or, you could read a fictional novel by J.R.R Tolkien. As my guest, Christopher Snyder, observes, the ideals of virtue ethics are well illustrated in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, being vividly embodied in the characters of Middle-earth.