Thomas Alan Shippey entered the world on the 9th of September 1943 in Calcutta, British India. His father Ernest worked as an engineer while his mother Christina Emily Kjelgaard managed their household during those early years.
Tom Shippey occupied the same professorial chair at Leeds University once held by J.R.R. Tolkien after being elected to this position in 1979. He taught Old and Middle English using the very syllabus that Tolkien had originally devised decades earlier.
The correspondence took thirty years for Tom Shippey to fully decode due to its specialized politeness language. The phrase Course of actual composition became the title of the final chapter in Shippey's first major book on the subject.
Tom Shippey published The Road to Middle-earth in 1982 attempting to set Tolkien within the tradition of comparative philology founded by Jacob Grimm. Critics called it the single best thing written on Tolkien while receiving over nine hundred scholarly citations since publication.
Tom Shippey participated in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings film trilogy by assisting dialect coaches with pronunciation and linguistic accuracy. He appeared as an expert medievalist in all three documentary DVDs accompanying the special extended edition of the films.