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

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

Tolkien delivered the essay as a lecture at the British Academy in 1936, and it was published the same year. The work argued that earlier scholars had undervalued the poem’s monsters, especially Grendel and the dragon, by treating them mainly as distractions from historical information.

Tolkien maintained that the monsters were central to Beowulf’s artistic structure and meaning. His approach helped shift Beowulf criticism toward literary analysis rather than concentrating almost exclusively on source material, language history, or archaeological details.

The essay is often linked to Tolkien’s fiction because it takes dragons, mortality, courage, and the heroic past seriously as literary subjects. It should not be confused with On Fairy-Stories, a separate lecture and essay about fantasy, or The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son, a later work inspired by Old English literature.