What was J.R.R. Tolkien’s title at Oxford University when he held the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship?

J.R.R. Tolkien was Professor of Anglo-Saxon when he held Oxford’s Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship.

He occupied the post at Pembroke College from 1925 until 1945. The position focused on the language and literature of the Anglo-Saxon period, including Old English texts such as Beowulf. Tolkien’s scholarly expertise in historical languages strongly informed his fiction.

In 1945 he moved to Merton College and became the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, a position he held until his retirement in 1959. His academic career therefore included two distinct Oxford professorships, which can easily be mixed up.

Tolkien’s celebrated 1936 lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” helped change how the poem was studied. He argued that its monsters were central to its artistic design rather than distractions from its historical value.