After serving as a professor of English Language at Leeds University, Tolkien won a professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford in 1925. Nevertheless, his early academic success could not erase the heartache of war. Oxford University lost nearly one in five servicemen in the conflict. From Exeter College, Tolkien’s college, 141 men had perished. Thus he experienced “a time of sorrow and mental suffering.”18 The loss of so many friends to the war produced, in the words of his children, “a lifelong sadness.”19
