Which Oxford college did J.R.R. Tolkien teach at from 1945 to 1959?

J.R.R. Tolkien taught at Merton College, Oxford, from 1945 to 1959.

He held the Merton Professorship of English Language and Literature during this period. Before moving to Merton, he had been Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University. His academic career focused especially on historical languages, medieval literature, and philology.

Tolkien’s Oxford work was not separate from his creative writing. His knowledge of Old English, Middle English, Welsh, Finnish, and other linguistic traditions informed the sound, structure, and history of the languages he created for Middle-earth.

Merton College is one of Oxford’s constituent colleges and has a long history dating to the thirteenth century. Tolkien remained connected with Oxford after his retirement, and the city is strongly associated with both his scholarship and his fiction-writing career.