MIDDLE-EARTH TIMELINE
Tom Shippey is a philologist who taught Old and Middle English at Oxford and later at Leeds, the two universities where Tolkien himself taught. The Road to Middle-earth is his study of how Tolkien's work as a philologist shaped his fiction.
Shippey shows how Tolkien built Middle-earth from words and names, from Old English, Old Norse and Middle English texts, and from the questions those texts left open. He follows the road from the early mythology to The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. The book was first published by George Allen & Unwin in 1982, and was revised and expanded in later editions, the third in 2003. It is one of the main studies of Tolkien.
How a professor of Old English built a world out of words: Tom Shippey on the philology behind Middle-earth.