What was J.R.R. Tolkien’s profession at the University of Oxford when he published The Hobbit?

When J.R.R. Tolkien published The Hobbit in 1937, he was Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford. He held the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon from 1925 until 1945.

Tolkien’s academic career strongly influenced his fiction. His expertise included Old English language and literature, and his work on texts such as Beowulf shaped his understanding of heroic tradition, monsters, names, and invented histories. He also taught at Oxford’s Exeter College and later became Merton Professor of English Language and Literature.

The Hobbit emerged alongside this scholarly career rather than replacing it. Tolkien’s private myth-making, language invention, and storytelling developed over decades while he worked as a philologist and university teacher.

He is sometimes described simply as an English literature professor, which is broadly understandable but less precise. His Oxford title at the time of The Hobbit’s publication specifically identified Anglo-Saxon, the historical form of English associated especially with Old English texts.