Before his 1925 Oxford professorship, J.R.R. Tolkien specialized academically in Anglo-Saxon.
Tolkien became Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford in 1925. Anglo-Saxon is the traditional scholarly term for Old English, the language spoken and written in parts of early medieval England. His work involved language, literature, philology, and the historical study of texts.
His expertise in Old English strongly influenced his creative writing. He drew on names, vocabulary, literary forms, and heroic traditions from works such as Beowulf, while transforming those materials into original languages and stories. His famous 1936 lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” helped change modern scholarly approaches to the poem.
Tolkien later became Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford in 1945. That later chair covered a broader field, but Anglo-Saxon was the specialty associated with his first Oxford professorship.