What was J.R.R. Tolkien's academic field at the University of Leeds before he became a professor at Oxford?

J.R.R. Tolkien was a professor of English language and literature at the University of Leeds before becoming an Oxford professor.

Tolkien joined the University of Leeds in 1920 as a reader in English language and later became a professor there. His academic work focused especially on Old English, Middle English, and Germanic philology. He collaborated with E. V. Gordon on the influential edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, published in 1925.

In 1925 Tolkien moved to Oxford as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon. He later became Merton Professor of English Language and Literature. His professional field is sometimes reduced to “mythology” because of his fiction, but mythology was not the formal discipline named in these university appointments. His language scholarship strongly shaped the invented languages and historical depth of his stories.