J.R.R. Tolkien became Oxford’s Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon in 1925.
The professorship placed Tolkien among the leading scholars of Old English language and literature. At Oxford, he studied and taught subjects including Old English, Middle English, philology, and medieval texts. His scholarly work was separate from, but closely connected to, his creative writing.
Tolkien’s expertise in historical languages helped him construct believable fictional languages such as Quenya and Sindarin. His work on Beowulf was especially influential, and his 1936 lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” helped change how the poem was studied.
He later became Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford in 1945. The title Anglo-Saxon refers here to the Old English language and its literary culture, not to a modern nationality or a fictional people from Middle-earth.