What was the name of Tolkien’s 1936 lecture that became a landmark study of Beowulf?

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

He delivered it as the British Academy’s Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture. The address challenged approaches that treated Beowulf mainly as a historical source or as a damaged collection of folklore. Tolkien argued that the poem should be appreciated as a coherent work of art.

A central part of his argument was that the monsters are essential to Beowulf rather than embarrassing distractions. Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon help create the poem’s structure and its meditation on courage, mortality, and the limits of human achievement.

The lecture became one of the most influential pieces of modern Beowulf criticism. It also demonstrates how Tolkien’s academic expertise and literary imagination reinforced one another: his reading of an Old English poem helped reshape scholarly and popular understanding of the text.