What was J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1936 lecture on Beowulf called?

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

Tolkien delivered the lecture at Oxford on 25 November 1936, and it was published in 1937. The essay argued that critics should take the poem’s monsters seriously as central elements of its artistic design, rather than treating them as distractions from supposedly more historical material.

His approach helped change modern attitudes toward Beowulf. Tolkien emphasized the poem’s structure, symbolism, and tragic vision, presenting it as a carefully made work of literature rather than merely a source of information about Anglo-Saxon history.

The lecture became one of the most influential twentieth-century studies of Beowulf. It also illustrates the connection between Tolkien’s academic work and his fiction: his appreciation of monsters, heroic cultures, and northern myth informed both his scholarship and his imaginative writing.