J.R.R. Tolkien’s academic field at Oxford University was philology.
Philology is the historical study of languages through written texts, including how words, sounds, and grammatical forms change over time. Tolkien’s expertise in this field strongly influenced his fiction: he created languages with internal histories and used invented names to suggest the cultures and pasts of his peoples.
He became a professor at the University of Leeds before returning to Oxford. At Oxford, he held the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon from 1925 to 1945 and later the Merton Professorship of English Language and Literature from 1945 to 1959.
Tolkien’s academic work included teaching and editing medieval texts, and he was especially associated with Beowulf. His famous lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” delivered in 1936, helped change how scholars approached the poem. Writing fiction and studying old languages were therefore closely connected parts of his career.