At which university did J.R.R. Tolkien teach Old and Middle English before joining Oxford?

J.R.R. Tolkien taught Old and Middle English at the University of Leeds before joining Oxford.

Tolkien became a professor of English language at Leeds in 1920, when he was 28 years old. He taught subjects connected with historical linguistics and medieval literature, including Old English, Middle English, and Germanic philology. His Leeds years were academically productive and helped establish his reputation as a specialist in early languages and texts.

In 1925, Tolkien left Leeds to become Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford. He later held the Merton Professorship of English Language and Literature at Oxford from 1945 until his retirement in 1959. Oxford is more closely associated with his mature career and with the writing of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

The Leeds appointment is easy to overlook because Tolkien is often described primarily as an Oxford professor. His professional path, however, included important teaching and research before Oxford. His philological training was central to his fiction: invented languages, historical sound changes, and the evolution of words helped shape Middle-earth’s cultures.