What was the name of Tolkien’s 1936 lecture that influenced modern Beowulf studies?

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

Tolkien delivered Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics as the Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture at the British Academy on 25 November 1936. It was later published in 1937. The lecture argued that scholars had undervalued the poem’s monsters, especially Grendel and the dragon, by concentrating too heavily on historical information extracted from the text.

Tolkien maintained that Beowulf should be understood as a work of art with a coherent imaginative structure. He compared the poem to a tower and emphasized how its parts contribute to a unified design. His argument helped redirect Beowulf criticism toward literary interpretation rather than treating the poem merely as a source of information about Anglo-Saxon history.

The lecture did not claim that the monsters were unimportant or childish. Instead, Tolkien argued that they were central to the poem’s meaning. The essay remains one of his most influential works of literary scholarship and is frequently assigned in courses on Old English literature.