J.R.R. Tolkien served as a professor and fellow of Merton College from 1945 until his retirement.
In 1945, Tolkien moved from the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon to the Merton Professorship of English Language and Literature. The new position was attached to Merton College at the University of Oxford, where he remained until 1959. During this period he continued teaching, researching medieval literature, and developing the writings that became The Lord of the Rings.
Tolkien’s earlier Oxford affiliation was with Pembroke College, where he was a fellow and tutor from 1925 to 1945. That distinction makes the college question easy to mix up: Tolkien was associated with both colleges, but they belong to different stages of his academic career.
At Merton, Tolkien lived and worked during the years when his public literary reputation expanded rapidly. The Lord of the Rings was published in three volumes between 1954 and 1955. His Oxford posts demonstrate that his fiction developed alongside a sustained professional career in language and literature.