What academic subject did J.R.R. Tolkien teach as a professor at Oxford?

J.R.R. Tolkien taught English language and literature as a professor at Oxford.

His Oxford career included posts at the University of Leeds and the University of Oxford. At Oxford, he became Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon from 1925 to 1945, then Merton Professor of English Language and Literature from 1945 until 1959.

Tolkien’s scholarship focused especially on Old and Middle English. His famous 1936 lecture and essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” helped change the way the poem was studied by emphasizing its artistic structure rather than treating it mainly as historical evidence.

His academic expertise strongly influenced his fiction. He drew on Old English, Norse mythology, medieval romance, and philology when creating Middle-earth. He was not primarily a historian or archaeologist, although historical languages and cultures were essential sources for his imaginative work.