What was the title of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1936 lecture that became a major essay on fantasy literature?

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

Tolkien delivered Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics as the Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture at the British Academy on 25 November 1936. It was later published in 1937 and became one of the most influential modern essays on the Old English poem Beowulf.

The lecture argued that critics should take the poem’s monsters, especially Grendel and the dragon, seriously as central artistic elements rather than treating them as secondary folklore. Tolkien also emphasized the poem’s structure, tone, and poetic achievement.

The essay helped change scholarly attitudes toward Beowulf and reinforced Tolkien’s reputation as a major philologist before The Lord of the Rings made him famous to a mass readership. It is often confused with “On Fairy-Stories,” another important Tolkien essay, but that work developed from a 1939 lecture and addresses fairy stories more broadly.