What was J.R.R. Tolkien’s Oxford professorship from 1925 to 1945 called?

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Oxford professorship from 1925 to 1945 was the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon.

Tolkien took the chair at Oxford in 1925 after leaving the University of Leeds, where he had been a professor of English language. The Oxford position placed him at the center of the study of Old English and related Germanic languages, fields that strongly shaped his professional and creative life.

He held the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship for two decades and later became Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford. His academic work included major contributions to Old and Middle English studies, as well as the celebrated Beowulf lecture The Monsters and the Critics.

The title is easy to confuse with Tolkien’s later Merton professorship. The Rawlinson and Bosworth chair belongs specifically to his Oxford years from 1925 until 1945, before his move to the Merton chair.