What is the full title of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1936 lecture later published as “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”?

J.R.R. Tolkien’s famous 1936 lecture is titled Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.

Tolkien delivered the lecture on 25 November 1936 at the British Academy. It was published in 1937 and became one of the most influential modern discussions of the Old English poem Beowulf. Tolkien argued that critics had focused too heavily on historical sources and incidental details while neglecting the poem’s artistic structure.

He defended the monsters—especially Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon—as essential to the poem’s design rather than embarrassing remnants of primitive storytelling. His argument helped establish Beowulf as a work of literature worthy of close artistic analysis, not merely a document for reconstructing Germanic history.

The lecture also influenced how later readers understood Tolkien’s own fiction. His interest in monsters, heroic courage, and the tension between mortality and fame appears in both his scholarship and his invented mythology, though Beowulf remains an independent medieval poem.