Which Oxford college employed J.R.R. Tolkien when he began writing The Hobbit?

Pembroke College employed J.R.R. Tolkien when he began writing The Hobbit.

Tolkien became a fellow and tutor at Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1925, when he was appointed Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon. During his years there, he developed and wrote much of The Hobbit, which was published in 1937.

The origin story of The Hobbit is often connected with Tolkien writing the sentence “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit” on an examination paper. The exact circumstances are discussed by biographers, but Tolkien clearly developed the story during his Pembroke period. He also wrote substantial early material connected with the mythology later published as The Silmarillion.

Tolkien left Pembroke for Merton College in 1945 after receiving the Merton Professorship of English Language and Literature. Because both colleges are central to his Oxford career, biographies sometimes require careful attention to dates when identifying where he worked during a particular stage of his writing.