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

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

Tolkien delivered the work 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 its historical or linguistic material.

He maintained that Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon were central to Beowulf’s artistic design. The lecture helped shift modern criticism toward reading the poem as a coherent work of literature rather than merely a source of historical information.

The title is sometimes shortened to The Monsters and the Critics, but the full title begins with Beowulf. Tolkien’s expertise in Old English was central to his academic career and also influenced his creative writing. The essay remains one of the best-known pieces of twentieth-century Beowulf scholarship.