What was J.R.R. Tolkien’s academic field as a professor at Oxford?

J.R.R. Tolkien was an Oxford professor of Anglo-Saxon, the historical English language commonly called Old English.

He held the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University from 1925 to 1945. He then became the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, a position he held until 1959.

Tolkien’s professional study of languages and medieval texts strongly shaped his fiction. He was especially interested in how languages, names, legends, and poetic traditions fit together. His famous lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” helped change the way the Old English poem was studied.

Tolkien is sometimes described simply as a literature professor, which is broadly true but less precise. His first Oxford chair specifically concerned Anglo-Saxon, while his later chair covered English language and literature more widely.