Which Oxford academic position did J.R.R. Tolkien take up in 1925?

J.R.R. Tolkien took up the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford in 1925. The position placed him among Britain’s leading scholars of Old English language and literature.

Tolkien had studied classics at Oxford before shifting his focus toward English philology. His expertise included Old English, Middle English, Germanic languages and the historical development of words. He held the Rawlinson and Bosworth chair at Pembroke College, Oxford, until 1945.

In 1945, Tolkien moved to Merton College and became Merton Professor of English Language and Literature. That later title is often confused with the position he first obtained in 1925, but the two chairs were different.

His academic work and his fiction were closely connected. Tolkien’s knowledge of linguistic history, mythic traditions and medieval texts helped shape Middle-earth, while his invented languages supplied its peoples with distinctive identities and histories.