What was the name of J.R.R. Tolkien’s first academic chair at Oxford?

J.R.R. Tolkien’s first academic chair at Oxford was the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon.

He held the position from 1925 until 1945. The chair focused on Old English, the language and literature of Anglo-Saxon England, a field central to Tolkien’s academic career and creative work.

Tolkien then became Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, a separate Oxford chair, in 1945 and held it until his retirement in 1959. These two posts are often confused because both were at Oxford and both concerned language and medieval literature.

His scholarship included major work on Beowulf, and his academic expertise influenced the texture of his fiction. He treated invented languages as historical systems, with related forms and imagined changes over time. Although he became famous as a novelist, Tolkien remained a professional philologist and university teacher throughout much of his working life.