Which university employed J.R.R. Tolkien before his return to Oxford in 1925?

The University of Leeds employed J.R.R. Tolkien before his return to Oxford in 1925. He became Reader in English Language there in 1920 and Professor of English Language in 1924.

At Leeds, Tolkien worked with E. V. Gordon on a major edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, published in 1925. Their collaboration helped establish Tolkien as a respected medievalist and philologist before his later fame as a novelist.

Tolkien left Leeds in 1925 to become Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. He later held the Merton Professorship of English Language and Literature at Merton College.

The Leeds period is important because it shows that Tolkien was an established academic before The Hobbit appeared in 1937. Readers sometimes assume Oxford was his only university workplace, but Leeds was the setting for his first full university professorship and for important early scholarship.