What was J.R.R. Tolkien’s academic professorship at Oxford from 1945 to 1959?

J.R.R. Tolkien was the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford from 1945 to 1959.

The professorship was based at Pembroke College, Oxford, where Tolkien taught Old English and related subjects. His academic work focused on language, literature, and philology, the historical study of languages. He was especially known for his scholarship on texts such as Beowulf, the Old English epic that also influenced his creative writing.

Tolkien had previously held the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship from 1925 to 1945. In 1945 he moved to the Merton Professorship of English Language and Literature, which he held until his retirement in 1959. This two-stage career is often simplified or misreported when biographies mention only that he was an Oxford professor.

His academic expertise shaped Middle-earth’s names, genealogies, poems, and invented languages. Tolkien did not treat fantasy and philology as unrelated activities: constructing the histories of languages was one of the central methods through which he developed his fictional cultures.