J.R.R. Tolkien’s Oxford chair from 1925 to 1945 was specifically named for Anglo-Saxon.
He held the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford during those years. In this context, Anglo-Saxon refers chiefly to Old English language and literature, including texts such as Beowulf.
Tolkien’s scholarship was central to his identity as a philologist. He studied how languages developed, how words changed, and how literary traditions preserved older stories. These interests informed both his academic publications and his creative mythology.
His later Oxford chair, at Merton College, was broader: Merton Professor of English Language and Literature. The two positions are therefore related but not identical.