What is the title of Tolkien’s 1936 lecture that became a landmark study of the poem Beowulf?

Tolkien’s 1936 landmark lecture on Beowulf is titled “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.”

Tolkien delivered the lecture at Oxford in 1936, and it was published soon afterward. At the time, scholars often treated Beowulf mainly as evidence about Germanic history, language, or mythology. Tolkien argued that the poem should also be judged as a work of literature with a coherent artistic design.

He defended the importance of the poem’s monsters, especially Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon. Rather than seeing these elements as distractions from historical material, Tolkien argued that they are central to Beowulf’s meaning and structure.

The lecture became one of the most influential modern works of Beowulf criticism. It helped establish a more literary approach to the poem and affected later generations of scholars.

Tolkien’s expertise in Old English made the lecture especially authoritative. His fiction was later compared with Beowulf because both works use monsters, heroic traditions, and a sense of loss, although they are separate compositions.