J.R.R. Tolkien’s academic specialty at Oxford before his English-literature professorship was Anglo-Saxon.
At Oxford, Tolkien served as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon from 1925 to 1945. Anglo-Saxon, also called Old English, is the early form of English used in England before the Norman Conquest and in later Old English literature. Tolkien’s scholarship included language, textual interpretation, and the historical cultures connected with these works.
His expertise influenced his creative writing in direct and indirect ways. He drew on Old English vocabulary, names, poetic forms, and heroic traditions when developing Middle-earth. His 1936 lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” also helped reshape scholarly discussion of the Old English poem.
Tolkien later became Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, a broader post. Medieval French, German, Greek, and other languages mattered to his education, but Anglo-Saxon was the specialty attached to his earlier Oxford chair.