What was the title of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Oxford professorship in Old English?

J.R.R. Tolkien held the title Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford.

He was appointed to the professorship in 1925 and held it until 1945. The position was associated with the study of Old English, the language of works such as Beowulf. Tolkien’s academic expertise in historical languages and medieval texts deeply informed his fictional languages and invented histories.

In 1945, Tolkien moved to another Oxford position: Merton Professor of English Language and Literature. He remained at Merton College until his retirement in 1959. The two titles are therefore both associated with him, but they belong to different stages of his Oxford career.

The professorship’s name uses Anglo-Saxon, a traditional term for Old English studies. Tolkien’s 1936 lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” helped change how the poem was understood, arguing that its monsters were central to its artistic design rather than distractions from its historical value.