J.R.R. Tolkien served as a professor of which subject at the University of Oxford?

J.R.R. Tolkien served as a professor of English language and literature at the University of Oxford. His academic career combined medieval language study, literary criticism, and teaching with the imaginative work that produced Middle-earth.

Tolkien held the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford from 1925 to 1945. He then became Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, a position he held until his retirement in 1959. His scholarship focused especially on Old and Middle English texts.

His expertise in languages strongly shaped his fiction. He invented languages such as Quenya and Sindarin with attention to historical sound change and grammar, rather than treating them as collections of arbitrary words. His famous 1936 lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” helped change how the poem was studied.