J.R.R. Tolkien was at the University of Oxford when he became Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon.
Tolkien studied classics and English at Exeter College, Oxford, and later held several academic posts there. In 1925 he became Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, a position he held until 1945. He then became Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford, remaining in that chair until 1959.
His Oxford career strongly shaped both his scholarship and his fiction. He worked extensively on Old English, Middle English, Germanic languages, and medieval literature. Tolkien also met C. S. Lewis at Oxford, and the two became members of the informal literary group known as the Inklings. The university is therefore central not only to his professional biography but also to the intellectual friendships surrounding the development of his major works.