The Old English poem studied by J.R.R. Tolkien in his famous 1936 lecture was Beowulf.
Tolkien delivered “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” at the British Academy in 1936. The lecture argued that scholars had paid too much attention to using Beowulf as evidence for Germanic history and had undervalued its literary construction. Tolkien insisted that Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon were central to the poem’s meaning rather than embarrassing leftovers from folklore.
Beowulf is an Old English heroic poem about a warrior who fights monstrous enemies and later faces a dragon as an aging king. Its surviving manuscript dates from around the year 1000, although the poem itself was composed earlier. Tolkien’s approach helped establish the poem as a work worthy of close literary criticism in its own right.
The Wanderer and The Seafarer are also Old English poems, while Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a Middle English poem that Tolkien translated and studied. None was the title of the landmark 1936 lecture. Tolkien’s scholarship on Beowulf strongly influenced his understanding of myth, heroic literature, and monsters.