Which university employed J.R.R. Tolkien as a professor from 1925 to 1945?

The University of Oxford employed J.R.R. Tolkien as a professor from 1925 to 1945.

Tolkien became Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford in 1925. He held that position until 1945, when he moved to the Merton Professorship of English Language and Literature, also at Oxford. He retired from the university in 1959.

His academic work focused on languages and medieval literature, especially Old English and Middle English. Tolkien’s expertise in texts such as Beowulf shaped his understanding of myth, heroic poetry, monsters, and invented history. His famous 1936 lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” helped change the way the poem was studied.

Tolkien did teach at the University of Leeds earlier in his career, from 1920 to 1925. That fact sometimes causes confusion, but Oxford was the institution associated with his longest and most influential academic career.