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

“Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” was J.R.R. Tolkien’s influential paper about the Old English poem Beowulf.

Tolkien delivered the lecture in 1936 at the British Academy, and it was published in the same year. He argued that scholars had focused too heavily on historical details and linguistic evidence while neglecting the poem’s artistic unity and imaginative power.

The lecture defended the importance of Beowulf’s monsters, especially Grendel and the dragon, rather than treating them as distractions from the poem’s historical background. Its approach helped transform modern literary criticism of the poem.

The work is often discussed alongside Tolkien’s fiction because his scholarship and storytelling shared interests in monsters, heroic courage, mortality, and the limits of human achievement. It was an academic lecture and essay, not a Middle-earth narrative.