What is the title of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1936 lecture and essay about Beowulf?

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

Tolkien delivered the lecture at Oxford on 25 November 1936. It argued that scholars had placed too much emphasis on historical details and not enough on the poem’s artistic structure, especially its monsters and central imaginative themes.

The lecture became one of the most influential modern works of Beowulf criticism. Tolkien treated Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon as essential to the poem rather than embarrassing distractions from supposedly more serious history.

Tolkien’s scholarship on Old English literature also included work on language and translation. His academic attention to myth, heroic poetry, and monsters influenced the way later readers understood both Beowulf and the imaginative foundations of his own fiction.