What was the name of Tolkien’s 1936 lecture that influenced modern fantasy scholarship?

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

Tolkien delivered the lecture at Oxford on 25 November 1936. It challenged scholars who treated the monsters in Beowulf as distractions from the poem’s supposed historical or linguistic value. Tolkien argued that Grendel, his mother, and the dragon were central to the poem’s structure and meaning.

The lecture became one of the most important works of modern Beowulf criticism. Tolkien presented the poem as a carefully composed work of art rather than a damaged collection of older fragments. His emphasis on myth, monsters, and literary design also influenced later fantasy writers and readers, even though the lecture itself is a work of literary scholarship.