What was the title of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1936 lecture on the literary value of Beowulf?

J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1936 lecture on the literary value of Beowulf was titled Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.

Tolkien delivered the lecture at Oxford on 25 November 1936. He argued that Beowulf should be studied as a work of art rather than treated mainly as a container of historical information about Anglo-Saxon society. His central image compares the poem to a tower, emphasizing how scholars can damage their view of the whole work by dismantling it only for its individual stones.

The lecture defended the importance of the monsters—Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon—as essential to the poem’s design. Tolkien’s argument helped influence later Beowulf scholarship and encouraged readers to take the poem’s imaginative structure seriously.

The essay is also important biographically because Tolkien was a philologist whose academic work directly informed his fiction. It is not a retelling of Beowulf, and it should not be confused with Tolkien’s later translation of the poem, published posthumously as Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary.