Michael D.C. Drout is Associate Professor of English at Wheaton College, Norton, MA, where he teaches Old and Middle English, fantasy and science fiction. Drout received his Ph.D. from Loyola Chicago. He holds M.A. degrees from Stanford and Missouri and a B.A. from Carnegie Mellon.

Drout recently edited J.R.R. Tolkien's Beowulf and the Critics (MRTS 2002), which won the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Inklings Studies for 2003. His most recent book, How Tradition Works: A Descriptive Cultural Poetics of the Anglo-Saxon Tenth Century will be published by MRTS in 2004. In addition to articles on Tolkien's prose style and his creation of a mythology for Anglo-Saxon England, Drout has published on the Anglo-Saxon wills, the Old English translation of the Rule of Chrodegang and the Exeter Book 'wisdom poems.' He has also published articles on Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea books and Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising series. He has written an Old English grammar book. Drout is one of the editors of the new journal Tolkien Studies and the executive editor of the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia (to be published in 2006).

He is director of the J.R.R. Tolkien Research Group and co-director of the Anglo-Saxon Medicine Project. Drout is currently at work on articles on inheritance in Beowulf and the Old English poem "The Ruin," and has begun a new book, From Tradition to Culture: The Making of the Anglo-Saxon Eleventh Century. Drout lives in Dedham, Massachusetts with his wife and daughter.