John D. Rateliff is an American scholar of fantasy literature and a roleplaying-game designer, best known as the author of The History of the Hobbit.
Raised in Arkansas, he moved to Wisconsin in 1981 to study J.R.R. Tolkien's manuscripts at Marquette University, and took a doctorate in twentieth-century British literature there with a dissertation on Lord Dunsany - a qualification he cheerfully calls 'a PhD in fantasy'. Alongside his scholarship he spent years in the games industry, working as an editor and designer at TSR and Wizards of the Coast and helping to shape the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons.
His major work, The History of the Hobbit, is a two-volume study that presents Tolkien's earliest drafts of The Hobbit with detailed commentary, filling the one great gap left by Christopher Tolkien's History of Middle-earth; it won the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Inklings Studies.
A rare figure who bridges academic Tolkien studies and the tabletop-gaming world his subject helped inspire, he writes with deep learning and evident delight in both.
