News of a new Tom Shippey book, Beowulf and the North before the Vikings, from Amsterdam University Press. Here’s the blurb…

Ever since Tolkien’s famous lecture in 1936, it has been generally accepted that the poem Beowulf is a fantasy, and of no use as a witness to real history. This book challenges that view, and argues that the poem provides a plausible, detailed, and consistent vision of pre-Viking history which is most unlikely to have been the poet’s invention, and which has moreover received strong corroboration from archaeology in recent years. Using the poem as a starting point, historical, archaeological, and legendary sources are combined to form a picture of events in the North in the fifth and sixth centuries: at once a Dark and a Heroic Age, and the time of the formation of nations. Among other things, this helps answer two long-unasked questions: why did the Vikings come as such a shock? And what caused the previous 250 years of security from raiders from the sea?

It was slipped out in August 2022, when many were at the beach. The podcast History of Vikings has a late September podcast interview on the book, and appears to be the only interview. This has an .MP3 download and the excellent long interview starts at 3:10 minutes. Shippey states that he had large amounts of friendly help from Scandinavian archaeologists, eager to bring their little-read recent discoveries to a wider public. Judging from what’s said it seems to have been a very productive engagement, as discovery after discovery slotted into place in the broader framework that Shippey was able to provide.

Amazon notes of the book “New edition”. But I can find no earlier edition, and the podcast interview suggests this is a wholly new book. Shippey does mention that there was a big difficulty in getting copies into warehouses, so perhaps that’s what’s meant — perhaps the first run had to be pulped due to printing problems, and then a new one produced?

Also of note, elsewhere, the new “A Babel of Shadows: The Meaning and Function of Shadows in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings“. A fine Masters dissertation, dated 2022, from a Dutch student. Written in English.