I actually had no idea that John Holm and Tom Shippey were the same person! Hearing him speak at length about his collaboration with Harry Harrison was a real treat. Thankyou for putting this together!
I found you by accident through Justin Sledge, and what a breath of fresh air, including especially the Robinson Jeffers video from a few years ago. Bravo, sir.
Jackson, this conversation is such a banger I had to download it to my hard drive as who knows what will happen in next years. It is a cultural heritage ;)🎉
More than an inspiration for Sci Fi, I think Beowulf is the inspiration for every crime procedural we have today. Just imagine the plot in a modern context. A supposedly secure, peaceful settlement is suddenly haunted by a brutal serial killer. With local authorities at their wits' end, a specialist is called in to catch the criminal and in the process busts a wicked criminal clan. Then, years later, the heroic detective has now been kicked upstairs into a cushy desk job, but he decides to take on one last case alongside a naive, optimistic rookie. And of course he goes the way of many an old cop in fictional stories, killed on his last case, leaving his young partner to take up his torch.
I know what you're thinking...do I have the strength of 30 men or only 20? Its late at night, and I don't really remember myself. Well, do you feel lucky, punk!
Wentbridge is a small village near Wakefield which was supposedly Robin Hood's original home. There's a blue plaque on the bridge that crosses the River Went.
GREAT ONE! my thanks to Jackson, patreon supporters and Professor Shippey! i have a digital copy of 'Laughing Shall i Die' WONDERFUL piece of work, i highly recommend it..
Tom Sheppey's rugby team-mates laughing at his broken leg are amazingly similar to the eskimos in one story I heard of - a European explorer who was staying with them happened to break his leg, and they all split their sides laughing. I've long forgotten the guy's name, but it might have been in one of Paul-Emile Victor's books I read it in, 50-odd years ago.
That is probably the biggest coincidental brag I ever heard; "When I had dinner with Tolkien". I can supplement that the archeologist Ulf Näsmann posits that Denmark was a united realm with one king from the sixth century, and in the seventh and eighth dominated the Frisians, who would pay tribute to the Danish kings at the very start of the eight century, where we have written sources. BTW, I built and used trebutchets.
Dr. Shippey, I want to praise the sensitive handling of Norse mysticism in The Hammer and the Cross. It's excellent not just in fidelity to the Norse sources but in capturing what having mystical and theophanic experiences is actually like.
In Sweden it’s called Eriksgata, following an old king Erik when he had to travel the kingdom to introduce himself to his people. At the moment I cannot remember if this was a real king, if it was in Svitiod or in Sweden etc.
In German a Hippe is a knife with kind of a sickle like blade. The word is derived from PIE *(s)kē̌p-, *(s)kō̌p-, *(s)kā̌p maybe the Shippeys worked with these types of tools. Could be an equivalent to the last name Pruner.
To Prof. Shippey's point beginning at 14:50 - could the choice of carpenter be due to the Anglo Saxon worship of trees? And could the latter not be read as a sign of pagan technophobia?
Is a "sling catapult" the same as a trebuchet? Shippey contrasts it with a "torsion catapult" but I was under the impression that all non-human-powered catas were torsion. My dad and I built a treb when I was a kid and so I know a bit about how they operate, but catapults are outside my experience.
Oh, to shout back to John Bell Hatcher, "Sometimes the observed fact is recalled incorrectly by an observer, not intentionally or anything." But, now I will shut up and just observe, myself. I seem to learn more when I stop considering and just trust the experts to do the thinking for me....tone doesn't translate so I will expound, that comment was not sarcastic, it was sincere. There is a reason we trust experts. Blah, blah, blah...
Very respectfully, I think the technophobe bit about Christianty and not progressing was reaching a little bit. Having said that, Walen the smith and cognate names were important pagan myths and had many place names after them, including in England. Walen's Smithy, etc.
The old name of Sweden was Svitiod and that’s supposed to be connected to svin, which is swine, but the vildsvin, the wild boar, not the tame pig. The totem of one tribe in Svealand was the wild boar. This was back before vendeltiden. Anyone knows if this is correct?
prof so casually telling how he was abandoned by his family for years, that he didn't even know his parents' language when he met them again. I'm so sad for him.
No. Den is from the ethnonym "Dane". Denmark means "the March of the Danes" as in the Dane's borderland. I am honestly not sure where English derives the "den" part of Sweden, as far as I am aware, only English uses it. In the Scandinavian languages it is called "Sverige". The -rige part means realm, cognate with German "reich". "the realm of the Swedes"
@@wezzuh2482actually in German Sweden is called Schweden. I don't know why. It sounds different than a lot of other European country names, for example that end in -land
Umm... not to British ears :) Prof Shippey has traces of the north-east, which he sometimes exaggerates for effect, and an overlay of the Dorset burr. No hint of scouse.
Sometimes it disappoints me to read about Tolkien's relationship to science fiction. There seems to be an impulse to denude the sci-fi he liked of the pulpy, dorky trappings that he might have considered "Saruman-like". From Wikipedia, about _The Voyage to Arcturus:_ "Tolkien, who used frame stories in his novels, did not approve of the frame story machinery, the back-rays and the crystal torpedo ship, that Lindsay had used; in his unfinished novel _The Notion Club Papers,_ Tolkien makes one of the protagonists, Guildford, criticise those kinds of "contraptions"." As if to say, "I love these otherworldly environments and humanoids, the broadening of our philosophical imagination that can only be explored through interacting with the alien... but do we have to ruin it with this nerd crap? 'Back-rays'? 'Crystal torpedoes'? It's so unwholesome, wouldn't it be nicer if we'd get to Arcturus through some more refined, spiritual means, that wouldn't be too incomprehensible to our preindustrial ancestors? All this mechanical stuff is such a fad." And the memory of that in turn made me think about how Tolkien would feel about the technophobia/technophilia theme of _The Hammer and the Cross._
I've heard someone say the best translation for what Jesus' father did was an unskilled migrant labourer, but that was just too bitter for translators to copy without sweetening it.
The Greek original τέκνον just means craftsman. No implication of unskilled or migrant. Shippey is talking nonsense here: monasteries were consistently cutting edge in terms of new technologies.
@@mattd8725 I have no clue what the Aramaic word would have been, but I imagine it would be the equivalent to the Greek. The texts all seem to be pretty certainly originally composed in Greek, so there isn’t much reason to think there were any sort of translation errors there. Their historical veracity can obviously be called in question, but I think most scholars would agree that they are faithful to the story of Jesus as it existed at the time of being put to paper, and in the Jesus story as we have it, his father is a craftsman
@@vthompson947 Shippey's theory can't be tested by comparing technologies in a monastery to technologies in "secular" places of Christendom. Of course even in a technophobic religion, the highest technology would be reserved for religious spaces, because religion is the most prioritized aspect of society so tech is used in cathedrals and bible-making and so on. You'd have to compare technologies in a monastery to technologies in Buddhist monasteries or the closest Islamic equivalent of a monastery, and you'd want the Buddhist and Islamic areas to be sufficiently similar to the Christian ones in historical context so that the only significant thing conceivably causing a difference in technology could be religion. Or make reasonable thought experiments comparing technology in a monastery to technology in the monastery of a hypothetical nonexistent religion. I think you can argue his argument is unfalsifiable, since we can't peer into alternate histories where different religions proliferated. But monasteries having the best technology Christendom could produce doesn't mean Christendom was producing the best technologies Europe could ever have.
![Eminem - Fuel (feat. JID) [Official Lyric Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/t5H_CewqpKA/mqdefault.jpg)
Yay!! This is gonna be epic!
If there is anything that can be hoped for, it is to be as sharp, funny and sagacious as Tom Shippey is at 80! Brilliant
I would certainly be down to hear Dr Crawford read an audiobook version of the Hammer and the Cross.
Love your content, cool to see you on this channel
Would be awesome!
As close as we we will ever get to Dr. Crawford interviewing Professor Tolkien himself. And we will take it 🤘😀
I actually had no idea that John Holm and Tom Shippey were the same person! Hearing him speak at length about his collaboration with Harry Harrison was a real treat. Thankyou for putting this together!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Please please have Shippey on again!!! Absolutely loved the whole thing and would love to hear the two of you talk about your translation!!
I've just added his Hammer and Cross series to my audible reading list. 👍
Love his book
I found you by accident through Justin Sledge, and what a breath of fresh air, including especially the Robinson Jeffers video from a few years ago. Bravo, sir.
Thank you so much for this gem.
Thanks for the nice words!
Jackson, this conversation is such a banger I had to download it to my hard drive as who knows what will happen in next years. It is a cultural heritage ;)🎉
More than an inspiration for Sci Fi, I think Beowulf is the inspiration for every crime procedural we have today. Just imagine the plot in a modern context.
A supposedly secure, peaceful settlement is suddenly haunted by a brutal serial killer. With local authorities at their wits' end, a specialist is called in to catch the criminal and in the process busts a wicked criminal clan. Then, years later, the heroic detective has now been kicked upstairs into a cushy desk job, but he decides to take on one last case alongside a naive, optimistic rookie. And of course he goes the way of many an old cop in fictional stories, killed on his last case, leaving his young partner to take up his torch.
I know what you're thinking...do I have the strength of 30 men or only 20? Its late at night, and I don't really remember myself. Well, do you feel lucky, punk!
Thanks!
Amazing, would love to hear another talk with Shippey, you can tell just how extensive his knowledge of the Germanic languages is.
This man is a gem
To think the Rings of Power showrunners let him go... unbelievable
I guess he was much too gallows for them haha
Given what they ultimately did, their lack of interest makes good sense.
That was when I knew not to bother with the Amazon thing.
Thanks for posting this, Jackson! The conversation was excellent.
Wentbridge is a small village near Wakefield which was supposedly Robin Hood's original home.
There's a blue plaque on the bridge that crosses the River Went.
This was exceptionally good.
There is an audiobook version of Hammer and the Cross. It’s on audible.
Amazing interview - I enjoyed this video immensely! Simply fantastic! Thank you SO MUCH, Doc Crawford! 🥰
Glad you enjoyed it!
All that etymology stuff is amazing.
GREAT ONE! my thanks to Jackson, patreon supporters and Professor Shippey! i have a digital copy of 'Laughing Shall i Die'
WONDERFUL piece of work, i highly recommend it..
Fascinating discussion, awesome to hear from someone who knew Tolkien personally
Make that audio book Jackson
What aa interview! Such a range of topics and all fascinating. And each of you inspiring the other.
Agreed!
Just bought the kindle and audible versions of The Hammer and the Cross - looking forwards to it!
Still beside myself that I missed this live, but very grateful for the recording. Thank you!
Awesome
Tom Sheppey's rugby team-mates laughing at his broken leg are amazingly similar to the eskimos in one story I heard of - a European explorer who was staying with them happened to break his leg, and they all split their sides laughing.
I've long forgotten the guy's name, but it might have been in one of Paul-Emile Victor's books I read it in, 50-odd years ago.
That was great. Hilarious the the Prof kept testing Jackson 😂. Brilliant insights from decades in the field.
Lovely talk! Having R. D. Fulk on the show too would be incredible as well.
It’s nice to hear Prof Shippey talk about the west midlands (where I’m from). It’s a forgotten area in someways.
One of your best interviews. I am a huge Harry Harrison fan and now a huge Shippey fan.
Very pleased to hear it!
I haven't even started yet, but I wanted to share my excitement!!! Thank you for sharing this, you're awesome, everything is awesome...la la la
Wonderful video.
Fantastic, more please!
That is probably the biggest coincidental brag I ever heard; "When I had dinner with Tolkien".
I can supplement that the archeologist Ulf Näsmann posits that Denmark was a united realm with one king from the sixth century, and in the seventh and eighth dominated the Frisians, who would pay tribute to the Danish kings at the very start of the eight century, where we have written sources.
BTW, I built and used trebutchets.
For some reason I feel an urge to correct Tom Shippey on one little thing. The highest point in Denmark isn't 170 feet but 171 metres after all.
I think you have to forgive someone of his generation, he was born many years before Britain decimalised :)
@@fang_xianfu True.
😂
Ok, low key... one of the best Schwarzenegger voices I have ever heard!
The man's a king 👑
Absolutely fascinating discussion. I need to start making time for the live streams again.
This was fantastic!
Dr. Shippey, I want to praise the sensitive handling of Norse mysticism in The Hammer and the Cross. It's excellent not just in fidelity to the Norse sources but in capturing what having mystical and theophanic experiences is actually like.
I wish I had more time for this right now.
In Sweden it’s called Eriksgata, following an old king Erik when he had to travel the kingdom to introduce himself to his people. At the moment I cannot remember if this was a real king, if it was in Svitiod or in Sweden etc.
In German a Hippe is a knife with kind of a sickle like blade. The word is derived from PIE *(s)kē̌p-, *(s)kō̌p-, *(s)kā̌p maybe the Shippeys worked with these types of tools. Could be an equivalent to the last name Pruner.
A similar knife in English is called a billhook or pruning knife. "Island of billhooks" is a pretty cool name!
What's the expedition mentioned at 57:14? The higlac expedition?
PLEASE DO RECORD AN AUDIO VERSION OF THE BOOK. LOOKING FORWARD TO IT🥺
Tell me about it!
"too much of a tangent"? the tangents are fun!
To Prof. Shippey's point beginning at 14:50 - could the choice of carpenter be due to the Anglo Saxon worship of trees? And could the latter not be read as a sign of pagan technophobia?
The whole hammer & cross series is available on audible, but Jackson I would purchase an edition from you.
Is a "sling catapult" the same as a trebuchet? Shippey contrasts it with a "torsion catapult" but I was under the impression that all non-human-powered catas were torsion. My dad and I built a treb when I was a kid and so I know a bit about how they operate, but catapults are outside my experience.
Catapult in Uk is like a basic 'Y' stick with an elastic band to propel a small object. I get from Shippey, it's called a slingshot in North America.
Derby was Northworthy when it was English (ie pre-Danish).
Tolkien’s personality, in my imagination, is like Dr. Shippey, but perhaps slower speaking.
Oh, to shout back to John Bell Hatcher, "Sometimes the observed fact is recalled incorrectly by an observer, not intentionally or anything." But, now I will shut up and just observe, myself. I seem to learn more when I stop considering and just trust the experts to do the thinking for me....tone doesn't translate so I will expound, that comment was not sarcastic, it was sincere. There is a reason we trust experts. Blah, blah, blah...
Very respectfully, I think the technophobe bit about Christianty and not progressing was reaching a little bit. Having said that, Walen the smith and cognate names were important pagan myths and had many place names after them, including in England. Walen's Smithy, etc.
The old name of Sweden was Svitiod and that’s supposed to be connected to svin, which is swine, but the vildsvin, the wild boar, not the tame pig. The totem of one tribe in Svealand was the wild boar. This was back before vendeltiden. Anyone knows if this is correct?
If Tom Shippey lives in Dorset, he should look up Robert Fripp.
He's Cwicca!
When I was at school Beowulf was in English, because New English hadn't been invented.
prof so casually telling how he was abandoned by his family for years, that he didn't even know his parents' language when he met them again. I'm so sad for him.
The den in Denmark surely means the same thing as the den in Sweden?
No. Den is from the ethnonym "Dane". Denmark means "the March of the Danes" as in the Dane's borderland.
I am honestly not sure where English derives the "den" part of Sweden, as far as I am aware, only English uses it. In the Scandinavian languages it is called "Sverige". The -rige part means realm, cognate with German "reich". "the realm of the Swedes"
@@wezzuh2482actually in German Sweden is called Schweden. I don't know why. It sounds different than a lot of other European country names, for example that end in -land
🐝 🐺
have to disappoint the highlanders we Danes measure our mountains in meters in fact
he sounds like Paul McCartney
Umm... not to British ears :) Prof Shippey has traces of the north-east, which he sometimes exaggerates for effect, and an overlay of the Dorset burr. No hint of scouse.
There’s a hint of Brummie/Midlands in there too, on occasion. Definitely no Scouse.
Sometimes it disappoints me to read about Tolkien's relationship to science fiction. There seems to be an impulse to denude the sci-fi he liked of the pulpy, dorky trappings that he might have considered "Saruman-like". From Wikipedia, about _The Voyage to Arcturus:_ "Tolkien, who used frame stories in his novels, did not approve of the frame story machinery, the back-rays and the crystal torpedo ship, that Lindsay had used; in his unfinished novel _The Notion Club Papers,_ Tolkien makes one of the protagonists, Guildford, criticise those kinds of "contraptions"."
As if to say, "I love these otherworldly environments and humanoids, the broadening of our philosophical imagination that can only be explored through interacting with the alien... but do we have to ruin it with this nerd crap? 'Back-rays'? 'Crystal torpedoes'? It's so unwholesome, wouldn't it be nicer if we'd get to Arcturus through some more refined, spiritual means, that wouldn't be too incomprehensible to our preindustrial ancestors? All this mechanical stuff is such a fad."
And the memory of that in turn made me think about how Tolkien would feel about the technophobia/technophilia theme of _The Hammer and the Cross._
I've heard someone say the best translation for what Jesus' father did was an unskilled migrant labourer, but that was just too bitter for translators to copy without sweetening it.
The Greek original τέκνον just means craftsman. No implication of unskilled or migrant. Shippey is talking nonsense here: monasteries were consistently cutting edge in terms of new technologies.
@@vthompson947 I understand the Romans turned it into carpenter, but what were the Greeks translating from?
@@mattd8725 I have no clue what the Aramaic word would have been, but I imagine it would be the equivalent to the Greek. The texts all seem to be pretty certainly originally composed in Greek, so there isn’t much reason to think there were any sort of translation errors there. Their historical veracity can obviously be called in question, but I think most scholars would agree that they are faithful to the story of Jesus as it existed at the time of being put to paper, and in the Jesus story as we have it, his father is a craftsman
@@vthompson947 Shippey's theory can't be tested by comparing technologies in a monastery to technologies in "secular" places of Christendom. Of course even in a technophobic religion, the highest technology would be reserved for religious spaces, because religion is the most prioritized aspect of society so tech is used in cathedrals and bible-making and so on. You'd have to compare technologies in a monastery to technologies in Buddhist monasteries or the closest Islamic equivalent of a monastery, and you'd want the Buddhist and Islamic areas to be sufficiently similar to the Christian ones in historical context so that the only significant thing conceivably causing a difference in technology could be religion. Or make reasonable thought experiments comparing technology in a monastery to technology in the monastery of a hypothetical nonexistent religion.
I think you can argue his argument is unfalsifiable, since we can't peer into alternate histories where different religions proliferated. But monasteries having the best technology Christendom could produce doesn't mean Christendom was producing the best technologies Europe could ever have.
@@mattd8725the original is Greek