What was the name of Tolkien’s lecture that reshaped modern readings of Beowulf?

Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics was J.R.R. Tolkien’s influential lecture on the Old English poem Beowulf. He delivered it at Oxford in 1936, and it was published in 1937.

Tolkien argued that critics should take the poem’s monsters seriously as central artistic elements rather than treating them as embarrassing leftovers from primitive storytelling. He presented Beowulf as a coherent work shaped by the tension between heroic life and mortality, with its monsters helping express that theme.

The lecture became one of the most important modern works of Beowulf criticism. It is not itself a translation of the poem, and it should not be confused with Tolkien’s later translation and commentary, published posthumously as Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary in 2014.