J.R.R. Tolkien delivered the lecture later published as “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” in 1936.
He presented it as the Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture at the British Academy. Tolkien argued that scholars had undervalued the poem by treating its monsters as distractions from supposedly more serious historical material.
Instead, he defended Beowulf as a carefully constructed work of art. In his reading, the poem’s dragons and other supernatural figures are central to its design, allowing it to explore mortality, courage, reputation, and the limits of human power.
The lecture became one of the most influential modern essays on Beowulf. It helped redirect academic discussion toward the poem’s literary structure and imaginative unity. The essay was published in the Proceedings of the British Academy in 1937, a detail that sometimes causes readers to confuse the publication year with the year of delivery.