What subject did J.R.R. Tolkien study at Oxford when he completed his degree?

J.R.R. Tolkien completed his Oxford degree in English Language and Literature.

He initially entered Exeter College, Oxford, to study Classics, but changed direction and pursued English. His academic interests included Old English, Middle English, philology, and the history of languages. Those studies supplied both the scholarly foundation and the linguistic inspiration for his later fiction.

Tolkien’s education was not simply literary in the modern sense. At Oxford, the study of English involved historical texts, language change, grammar, and medieval literature. Works such as Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Chaucer mattered deeply to his imagination and scholarship.

He later became an Oxford professor, teaching Anglo-Saxon and then English Language and Literature. Because Tolkien was also a successful novelist, his university subject is sometimes reduced to “English literature,” but the formal wording emphasizes language as well as literature and better reflects his philological training.