J.R.R. Tolkien taught Anglo-Saxon as Oxford’s Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor.
Tolkien held the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford from 1925 to 1945. The position placed him among leading scholars of Old English language and literature, fields that deeply influenced his fiction.
His academic work included the landmark lecture and essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” first delivered in 1936. Tolkien argued that Beowulf should be valued as a work of art rather than treated merely as historical evidence. His scholarship helped reshape modern approaches to the poem.
Tolkien later became Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford. That later chair is sometimes confused with the Rawlinson and Bosworth post. Both were Oxford positions, but the Rawlinson and Bosworth professorship specifically concerned Anglo-Saxon, the older name commonly used for Old English studies.