J.R.R. Tolkien served as a fellow and professor at Merton College, Oxford, at the end of his academic career.
Tolkien became Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford in 1925 and later moved to the Merton Professorship of English Language and Literature in 1945. Merton College was his Oxford base during that later professorship, which he held until his retirement in 1959.
His Oxford career combined teaching, philological research, and creative work. He studied and taught languages and medieval literature, while his private writing developed the stories later published as The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. His academic environment helped sustain his interest in the history of words, legends, and literary traditions.
Merton is sometimes confused with Exeter College, where Tolkien studied as an undergraduate, or Pembroke College, where he taught during his earlier Oxford years. Those colleges are important to his biography, but Merton was the college associated with his final Oxford professorship.