What was J.R.R. Tolkien’s first academic publication about Beowulf called?

J.R.R. Tolkien’s influential academic lecture about Beowulf was called “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.”

Tolkien delivered the lecture in 1936 at the British Academy. It argued that scholars had focused too heavily on historical details and linguistic evidence while neglecting the poem’s artistic structure and central monsters, especially Grendel and the dragon.

The lecture became one of the most important modern works of Beowulf criticism. Tolkien treated the poem as a coherent work of imaginative art rather than merely a damaged collection of historical sources.

The essay also helps explain Tolkien’s own fiction. He valued myth, monsters, courage, loss, and the tension between heroic action and inevitable death. Although the lecture was an academic work, its ideas are often studied alongside Tolkien’s creative writing because they illuminate his understanding of heroic literature.