What was the name of J.R.R. Tolkien’s academic essay about the Old English epic Beowulf?

J.R.R. Tolkien’s academic essay about Beowulf is titled Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics. He delivered the lecture at the British Academy on 25 November 1936, and it was published in the academy’s Proceedings in 1937.

The essay argued that critics should take Beowulf’s monsters seriously as central elements of the poem rather than treating them as distractions from historical information about Anglo-Saxon society. Tolkien presented the poem as a coherent work of art, emphasizing its structure, themes, and imaginative power.

The lecture became highly influential in Beowulf scholarship and helped shift attention toward the poem’s literary qualities. It is separate from Tolkien’s creative writings and from his later lecture On Fairy-Stories. The title’s reference to “the Monsters” is especially important: Tolkien’s argument was not simply that Beowulf contains monsters, but that studying their role is essential to understanding the poem as a whole.