What was J.R.R. Tolkien’s academic field at Oxford before his retirement?

J.R.R. Tolkien’s academic field at Oxford was English language and literature.

Tolkien taught and researched English language and literature at Oxford for most of his academic career. His work focused particularly on historical linguistics, Old and Middle English, Germanic languages, and medieval literature. He held the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon from 1925 to 1945 and the Merton Professorship of English Language and Literature from 1945 to 1959.

His scholarship directly informed his fiction. Tolkien’s expertise in Old English appears in his work on Beowulf, while his knowledge of medieval languages and northern European traditions shaped the names, poems, and histories of Middle-earth.

Tolkien was not trained primarily as a historian or archaeologist. His academic identity was that of a philologist and English scholar, although his research crossed into literature, mythology, language history, and medieval studies.