Which Oxford university professorship did J.R.R. Tolkien hold from 1945?

From 1945, J.R.R. Tolkien held the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University.

The post placed him in the academic tradition of studying Old English language and literature. Tolkien had already taught at Leeds and Oxford, and he became widely respected for his philological expertise as well as his fiction.

He held the Rawlinson and Bosworth chair until 1959. His scholarly interests included Beowulf, Middle English texts, Germanic languages, and the history of words. That background informed his attention to sound, grammar, naming, and invented languages in his creative work.

The title is often simplified as “Oxford English professor,” but that wording loses the specific subject and historical period. Tolkien was not simply a literature lecturer: Anglo-Saxon studies focused especially on Old English language and texts, a field central to his academic identity.