Which university college employed J.R.R. Tolkien as a professor from 1945?

Merton College, Oxford employed J.R.R. Tolkien as a professor from 1945. He became the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and held the post until his retirement in 1959.

Before moving to Merton, Tolkien was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College, Oxford, from 1925 to 1945. His academic work focused on philology, Old English, Middle English and the languages of northern Europe.

Pembroke is therefore a common wrong answer because it was an important earlier stage of Tolkien’s Oxford career. Tolkien’s professional scholarship and his fiction were closely connected: his expertise in historical languages, sound changes and medieval literature informed the invented languages and narratives of Middle-earth. His 1936 lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” also became highly influential in literary studies.