At which university did J.R.R. Tolkien serve as a professor of Anglo-Saxon?

J.R.R. Tolkien served as a professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford.

Tolkien held the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford from 1925 to 1945. He then became the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, a position he held from 1945 until his retirement in 1959. His academic work focused on languages, medieval literature, and philology.

His Oxford career strongly influenced his fiction. Tolkien studied and taught Old English, Old Norse, Middle English, Welsh-related material, and other historical languages. He also drew on medieval poems and legends when developing the cultures, names, and histories of Middle-earth.

Tolkien was connected with several Oxford colleges, including Pembroke College and Merton College. He wrote The Hobbit while teaching at Oxford, and many of his stories developed from private mythology, invented languages, and academic interests. The university was therefore both his professional workplace and an important setting for his creative life.