What was the name of J.R.R. Tolkien’s academic chair at Oxford from 1925 to 1945?

From 1925 to 1945, J.R.R. Tolkien was the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford.

Tolkien took up the chair at Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1925. His academic work focused on Old English language and literature, subjects that strongly informed his creative writing and his invented languages. He remained in the post for two decades.

In 1945, Tolkien moved to Merton College and became the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature. He held that chair until his retirement in 1959. These positions helped establish him as a major philologist before and alongside his fame as a novelist.

The title is often shortened in biographies to “Professor of Anglo-Saxon,” but its formal name was the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon. It was not the same position as his later Merton chair.