J.R.R. Tolkien’s academic field as Oxford’s Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor was Anglo-Saxon. The chair, formally associated with the study of Old English, was held by Tolkien from 1925 to 1945.
At Oxford, Tolkien taught and researched Old English language and literature. His scholarly work included major contributions to the study of Beowulf, Middle English texts, and the history of Germanic languages. His professional expertise in historical linguistics also shaped the invented languages and literary histories of Middle-earth.
Tolkien later became Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford, a post he held from 1945 until his retirement in 1959. These academic titles are sometimes simplified in biographies, leading readers to overlook how specialized his career was.
His fiction and scholarship were closely connected: philology was not merely a day job for Tolkien, but a central source of his ideas about names, language change, mythology, and invented peoples.