Which Oxford college employed J.R.R. Tolkien as a professor of Anglo-Saxon from 1925?

Pembroke College employed J.R.R. Tolkien as a professor of Anglo-Saxon from 1925.

Tolkien was appointed Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford in 1925. The professorship was attached to Pembroke College, where he taught and worked for two decades. His academic expertise covered Old English language and literature, subjects that strongly informed his understanding of medieval poetry, legend, and invented languages.

During his Pembroke years, Tolkien wrote or developed much of the material that eventually became The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. He also composed the lecture later published as “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” delivered in 1936. That lecture helped redirect scholarly attention toward the poem’s artistry and imaginative structure rather than treating its monsters as merely historical obstacles. Tolkien moved to Merton College in 1945, when he became Merton Professor of English Language and Literature. Thus Pembroke is associated with his Anglo-Saxon chair, while Merton belongs to the later stage of his Oxford career.