[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

Difficult though it may be to believe, Tolkien never wrote a PhD thesis. Like his inaugural lecture, his doctorates came at the end of his academic career. I think that we must consider another, slightly odder, possibility.

This theory is approaching the issue from the wrong side. Clearly the current PhD system has been remade as an allegory of Tolkien's novel, probably by faculties made up of those starry-eyed readers from the 1960s. It's probably part of a dark conspiracy to keep Beowulf on the undergraduate English syllabus.