What was the name of J.R.R. Tolkien’s academic lecture that reshaped Beowulf criticism?

J.R.R. Tolkien’s lecture that reshaped Beowulf criticism was “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.”

Tolkien delivered the lecture in 1936 at Oxford, and it was published the same year. Earlier scholars had often treated Beowulf mainly as historical evidence or as a source for information about Germanic society. Tolkien argued that the poem should be valued as a work of art, with its monsters and imaginative structure central to its meaning.

His argument did not reject historical study. Instead, it insisted that criticism should take the poem's artistic design seriously. Tolkien focused especially on Grendel, Grendel's mother, and the dragon, showing how they help organize the poem's themes of courage, mortality, and inevitable loss.

The lecture became one of the most influential modern essays on Old English literature. Its title is sometimes confused with “On Fairy-Stories,” another important Tolkien lecture and essay, but that work concerns fantasy, fairy tales, and the functions of imaginative literature.