 When in 1925, aged thirty-three, Tolkien applied for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College, Oxford, he boasted that his students of Germanic philology in Leeds had even formed a "Viking Club".He also had a certain, if imperfect, knowledge of Finnish.Privately, Tolkien was attracted to "things of racial and linguistic significance", and in his 1955 lecture "English and Welsh", which is crucial to his understanding of race and language, he entertained notions of "inherent linguistic predilections", which he termed the "native language" as opposed to the "cradle-tongue" which a person first learns to speak.