What was the name of Tolkien’s 1936 lecture that changed the study of Beowulf?

Tolkien’s 1936 lecture that changed the study of Beowulf was “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.”

Tolkien delivered the lecture at Oxford on 25 November 1936, and it was published in 1937. At the time, some scholars treated Beowulf mainly as evidence for Germanic history, language, or folklore rather than as a carefully constructed poem. Tolkien argued that its artistic structure deserved serious attention in its own right.

He defended the importance of the poem’s monsters, especially Grendel and the dragon. Instead of treating them as distractions from a supposed historical core, he saw them as essential to the poem’s design and meaning. His argument helped establish Beowulf as a major work of literature, not merely a sourcebook for other subjects.

The lecture also influenced later fantasy criticism and Tolkien’s own creative thinking. Its subject is sometimes confused with “On Fairy-Stories,” another important Tolkien essay, but that later lecture focuses on the nature and purposes of fairy stories.