J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1936 lecture and essay Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics discusses the Old English poem Beowulf.
Tolkien delivered the lecture at the British Academy in 1936, and it was published the same year. He argued that critics should treat Beowulf as a work of poetry rather than merely as a historical document or a source of information about Germanic society.
A central part of Tolkien’s argument was that the poem’s monsters—especially Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon—are essential to its structure and meaning. He challenged approaches that dismissed these supernatural elements as secondary or distracting.
The essay became one of the most influential works of modern Beowulf criticism. It also helps explain why monsters, heroic conflict, and the tension between mortality and fame mattered so deeply in Tolkien’s own imagination. The work is sometimes confused with Tolkien’s fiction, but it is a scholarly study of an older poem.