J.R.R. Tolkien published “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” in 1936.
Tolkien originally delivered the lecture on 25 November 1936 at the British Academy. It was later published in the Proceedings of the British Academy. The essay argued that Beowulf should be valued as a work of imaginative poetry, not merely as evidence for studying early Germanic history.
Tolkien emphasized the importance of the poem’s monsters, especially Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon. He argued that critics who treated those elements as distractions missed the poem’s artistic structure.
The lecture became one of the most influential modern discussions of Beowulf. Tolkien’s scholarship on Old English literature also informed his own creative writing, although the essay itself is literary criticism rather than a Middle-earth story.