What was Tolkien’s academic title at Oxford when he began The Lord of the Rings?

J.R.R. Tolkien held the title Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford when he began The Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien was appointed to the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship in 1925 and held it until 1945. The position placed him at the center of Oxford’s study of Old English language and literature. His scholarship included work on texts such as Beowulf, whose monsters, heroic culture, and poetic style influenced his thinking about myth and storytelling.

In 1945 Tolkien moved to the Merton Professorship of English Language and Literature, which he held until his retirement in 1959. Because both posts were at Oxford, biographies sometimes compress the distinction between them. The earlier title is the one associated with the beginning of his long work on The Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien’s academic career was not separate from his fiction. His expertise in historical linguistics shaped names, invented languages, word histories, and the layered pseudo-history that gives Middle-earth its depth.