What was J.R.R. Tolkien's 1936 lecture about Beowulf titled?

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

Tolkien delivered the lecture as the Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture at the British Academy in 1936. It argued that scholars had undervalued the poem's monsters by treating them as distractions from historical or linguistic material. Tolkien maintained that Grendel, Grendel's mother, and the dragon were central to the poem's structure and meaning.

The lecture became one of the most influential modern studies of Beowulf. It helped redirect attention toward the poem as a work of literature rather than merely a source for information about early Germanic history.

The essay also matters in Tolkien's biography because it shows the close relationship between his academic expertise and his creative writing. His study of Old English, heroic poetry, and myth informed the literary worlds he later developed, although Beowulf is not simply a sourcebook for Middle-earth.