What was the name of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1936 lecture on Beowulf?

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

Tolkien delivered the lecture at Oxford on 25 November 1936. It challenged approaches that treated Beowulf mainly as a source of historical or linguistic information rather than as a carefully constructed poem. Tolkien argued that the monsters were central to the poem’s artistic design.

The lecture became one of the most influential modern pieces of Beowulf criticism. It helped redirect attention toward the poem’s structure, symbolism, and imaginative power, especially the roles of Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon.

The title is sometimes shortened informally to The Monsters and the Critics, but the full title begins with Beowulf. Tolkien’s scholarship on Old English literature also influenced his own fiction, although the lecture itself is a work of literary criticism rather than a Middle-earth story.