 Shippey comments that such paradoxes, "the oscillations between animal and intelligent behaviour, the contrast between creaking politeness and plain gloating over murder" join to create Smaug's principal attribute, "wiliness".From 1925 to 1945, Tolkien was a professor of English Literature at Oxford University.He was a prominent scholar of the Old English poem "Beowulf", on which he gave a lecture at the British Academy in 1936.