What was J.R.R. Tolkien’s first published academic essay on the Old English poem Beowulf?

J.R.R. Tolkien’s influential academic essay on Beowulf is titled Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.

Tolkien delivered the lecture in 1936, and it was published in 1937. The essay argued that critics should pay serious attention to the poem’s monsters, especially Grendel and the dragon, rather than treating them as unimportant obstacles in a historical document.

Before Tolkien’s intervention, some scholarship had emphasized Beowulf’s value for reconstructing Germanic history and culture. Tolkien defended its artistic unity and argued that its supernatural elements were central to its meaning. The essay became one of the most influential pieces of modern Beowulf criticism.

The work also helps explain Tolkien’s own fiction. His scholarly engagement with dragons, heroic poems, monsters, and doomed warriors informed the imaginative world of Middle-earth. It is separate from “On Fairy-Stories,” Tolkien’s later essay about fantasy and fairy tales.