J.R.R. Tolkien taught at Merton College, Oxford, while he wrote much of The Lord of the Rings. He became Merton Professor of English Language and Literature in 1945 and held the post until his retirement in 1959.
Tolkien began writing The Lord of the Rings during the late 1930s, but the work developed slowly and was interrupted by his academic duties and other responsibilities. He completed the manuscript in the early 1950s. The book was published in three volumes between 1954 and 1955.
Tolkien had earlier taught at Pembroke College, Oxford, where he held the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon from 1925. He also studied at Exeter College, so these institutions are commonly confused when his Oxford career is summarized.
Merton College is therefore connected with the later phase of Tolkien’s academic career, not with his entire Oxford history. Oxford’s libraries, scholarly communities, and medieval studies environment provided an important setting for his work, although the landscapes and cultures of Middle-earth were products of a much broader imaginative and linguistic project.