What is the title of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1936 lecture that influenced modern literary study of Beowulf?

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

Tolkien delivered the lecture at Oxford on 25 November 1936, and it was published in 1937. He argued that critics had paid too much attention to using Beowulf as evidence about Germanic history and had undervalued its artistic construction. In particular, he defended the poem’s monsters as central to its design rather than as distractions from a supposedly more important historical core.

Tolkien presented Beowulf as a balanced poetic work whose themes include mortality, courage, and the tension between human achievement and inevitable decline. His argument helped shift scholarly attention toward the poem’s literary qualities.

The lecture is not a retelling of Beowulf and is not one of Tolkien’s Middle-earth stories. Its importance comes from literary criticism and from Tolkien’s professional expertise as an Old English scholar, an expertise that also informed the atmosphere and language of his fiction.