What was the name of J.R.R. Tolkien’s first major published scholarly essay on Beowulf?

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

Tolkien delivered the lecture at the University of Oxford in 1936, and it was published the same year. The essay argued that scholars had undervalued Beowulf as a work of literature by concentrating too heavily on its historical and linguistic information.

He urged readers to take the poem’s monsters, especially Grendel and the dragon, seriously as central elements of its artistic design. Tolkien’s argument helped redirect modern Beowulf criticism toward the poem’s structure, symbolism, and imaginative power.

The essay is not a translation of Beowulf and is not one of Tolkien’s Middle-earth stories. It is a landmark piece of literary scholarship, although its ideas about the poem also illuminate Tolkien’s own interest in monsters, heroic legend, and the relationship between myth and literature.