What was J.R.R. Tolkien’s academic specialty at Oxford before he became widely known as an author?

J.R.R. Tolkien’s academic specialty at Oxford was Old and Middle English.

Tolkien was a philologist, a scholar who studies language through historical texts and linguistic change. At Oxford, his teaching and research focused especially on Old English and Middle English. His knowledge of languages and medieval literature strongly influenced the names, sound patterns, poetry, and histories of Middle-earth.

He served as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford from 1925 to 1945. He then became Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, a position he held until 1959. His scholarship included important work on Beowulf and the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Tolkien also studied and invented many languages, including Quenya and Sindarin for his fictional world. That creative work should not be confused with his university specialty. His professional field was historical English language and literature, not simply general fantasy writing or one isolated foreign language.