What university professorship did J.R.R. Tolkien hold from 1925 to 1945?

J.R.R. Tolkien held the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford from 1925 to 1945.

He took the post at Pembroke College, Oxford, after teaching at the University of Leeds. The position focused on Old English, the language and literature of Anglo-Saxon England. Tolkien’s scholarly work included major studies of Beowulf, Middle English vocabulary, and the history of Germanic languages.

Tolkien’s academic expertise strongly informed his fiction. His knowledge of Old English, Norse literature, medieval heroic traditions, and philology shaped names, poetic styles, riddles, and invented histories in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. In 1945 he moved to Merton College and became Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, a position he held until his retirement in 1959. Readers sometimes confuse the two Oxford professorships, but the Rawlinson and Bosworth chair was his earlier academic appointment.