T. A. Shippey

Tom Shippey, who publishes as T. A. Shippey, is a British scholar and one of the world's foremost academic authorities on the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. Born Thomas Alan Shippey in 1943 in Calcutta in British India, where his father worked as an engineer, he was educated in England and at the University of Cambridge, training as a medievalist and philologist.

Shippey's academic career closely paralleled Tolkien's own. He attended King Edward's School in Birmingham, taught Old English at Oxford to the very syllabus Tolkien had devised, and in 1979 was elected to the Chair of English Language and Medieval English Literature at the University of Leeds, a post Tolkien had once held. This unusual closeness gave him rare insight into the linguistic and literary foundations of Tolkien's fiction.

He is best known for his books on Tolkien, particularly The Road to Middle-earth, published in 1982, which examines how Tolkien's philological scholarship shaped the creation of Middle-earth and which has been called the single best study of the author. His later book J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century reached an even wider readership.

A prolific scholar of medieval literature and of modern fantasy and science fiction, Shippey has published numerous monographs, editions, and articles, and has reviewed extensively for The Wall Street Journal. He is widely regarded as the leading interpreter of Tolkien's work and its deep roots in language and myth.