Which university employed J.R.R. Tolkien as a professor from 1925 to 1959?

The University of Oxford employed J.R.R. Tolkien as a professor from 1925 to 1959.

Tolkien became Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford in 1925. In 1945 he moved to the Merton Professorship of English Language and Literature, a position he held until his retirement in 1959.

His academic work focused on Old and Middle English language and literature. He was especially influential as a scholar of texts such as Beowulf, and his expertise in historical languages and medieval stories deeply informed his fiction.

Tolkien also taught at the University of Leeds earlier in his career, from 1920 to 1925. That distinction can create confusion, because both universities are important in his professional life. Oxford, however, was the institution where he spent the majority of his professorial career and wrote much of his most famous fiction.