What was the title of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1931 essay about Beowulf?

J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1931 essay about Beowulf was titled Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.

Tolkien delivered the essay as a lecture at the University of Oxford in 1936, and it was published in 1937. He argued that critics had undervalued the poem by concentrating too heavily on historical details and treating its monsters as distractions from supposedly more serious material.

Instead, Tolkien presented the monsters—especially Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon—as central to the poem’s structure and meaning. His argument helped redirect modern scholarship toward Beowulf as a unified work of art rather than merely a source of historical information.

The essay is important both to Tolkien’s academic career and to his creative development. It is often confused with On Fairy-Stories, another major Tolkien lecture and essay, but that work concerns fantasy, fairy stories, and the function of imagination rather than Beowulf specifically.