What academic position did J.R.R. Tolkien hold at Oxford from 1945 to 1959?

From 1945 to 1959, J.R.R. Tolkien held the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford.

The chair was established at the University of Oxford in 1858 and is associated with the study of Old English language and literature. Tolkien took up the position in 1945 after serving as Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford from 1925 to 1945. He held the Rawlinson and Bosworth chair until his retirement in 1959.

Tolkien’s academic work was central to his identity as a philologist. He studied languages historically, examining how they developed and how literary traditions preserved earlier forms. His expertise in Old English, Middle English, Norse, and related subjects informed his fiction without making the novels simple retellings of medieval texts.

The title is often shortened to “Professor of Anglo-Saxon,” but the formal name matters. Tolkien later became Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, a different Oxford chair, from 1959 until 1965.