Beowulf is the Old English poem Tolkien famously studied in his 1936 lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.”
The lecture argued that scholars should take the poem’s monsters and imaginative structure seriously rather than treating them as distractions from historical material. Tolkien presented Beowulf as a work of art with a carefully balanced design, not merely a source of information about Anglo-Saxon society.
The poem tells of the hero Beowulf, who fights Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and later a dragon. It survives in a single medieval manuscript and is one of the most important works of Old English literature. Tolkien’s scholarly attention to it also influenced modern readers’ understanding of heroic fantasy.
Tolkien was a philologist and professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. His scholarship and fiction were connected through his interest in language, myth, monsters, and the literary traditions of northern Europe.