J.R.R. Tolkien was the Oxford professor who wrote The Lord of the Rings.
Tolkien was a philologist and literary scholar whose professional work focused on languages and medieval literature. He taught at Oxford, holding the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon and later the Merton Professorship of English Language and Literature. His academic expertise strongly influenced the sounds, histories, and naming systems of his fiction.
The Lord of the Rings was written as a sequel to The Hobbit, but it grew into a much longer work with its own history, languages, poetry, and mythology. George Allen & Unwin published it in three volumes: The Fellowship of the Ring in 1954, followed by The Two Towers and The Return of the King in 1955.
Tolkien’s friend C.S. Lewis supported and discussed his writing, but Lewis did not write The Lord of the Rings. The two belonged to the informal Oxford literary group known as the Inklings, alongside other writers.