What was the name of Tolkien’s academic lecture that became the essay Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics?

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

Tolkien delivered the lecture as the British Academy’s Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture on 25 November 1936. It was published the following year and became one of the most influential modern essays on the Old English poem Beowulf.

The essay argues that critics should take Beowulf’s monsters seriously as central artistic elements rather than treating them as distractions from historical information. Tolkien emphasizes the poem’s structure, imagery, and balance between youth and age, life and death.

The work is important both to Tolkien’s scholarship and to his development as a storyteller. The lecture’s defense of myth, monsters, and imaginative literature helped shape later discussions of fantasy. It is distinct from On Fairy-Stories, Tolkien’s later lecture and essay about the nature and purposes of fairy-stories.