J.R.R. Tolkien served as a professor of English language and literature at the University of Oxford. He held the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon from 1925 to 1945, teaching Old English and related subjects.
Tolkien then became the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford, a position he held from 1945 until his retirement in 1959. His academic work strongly influenced his creative writing, especially his interest in Old English, Middle English, Germanic languages, and medieval literature.
Tolkien was associated with several Oxford colleges, including Pembroke College and Merton College. He wrote The Hobbit while working at Oxford and developed much of the mythology later published in The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion there. The university is therefore both the central institution of his academic career and a major setting in accounts of his life.