Which university position did J.R.R. Tolkien hold when he delivered his 1936 lecture on Beowulf?

J.R.R. Tolkien held the position of Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon when he delivered his 1936 Beowulf lecture.

Tolkien presented “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” at the British Academy on 25 November 1936. The lecture argued that critics should take the poem’s monsters seriously as central artistic elements, rather than treating them as distractions from its historical background.

He had held the Oxford professorship since 1925, after teaching at the University of Leeds. The lecture later became one of the most influential modern discussions of Beowulf and helped reshape academic views of the poem.

The title is sometimes confused with Tolkien’s later Oxford post. In 1945 he became Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, a different position he held until his retirement in 1959.