What was the title of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1936 lecture that became influential in Beowulf studies?

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

Tolkien delivered the lecture at the British Academy on 25 November 1936. It argued that Beowulf should be understood primarily as a work of literature rather than merely as historical evidence, a linguistic specimen, or a source for reconstructing Germanic society. Tolkien urged critics to take the poem’s monsters seriously as central elements of its design.

The lecture became one of the most influential modern works of Beowulf criticism. Tolkien examined the poem’s structure, its balance between youth and age, and the significance of its dragon and other monsters. His argument helped redirect scholarly attention toward the poem’s artistic unity and imaginative power.

Tolkien was a specialist in Old English and held a major academic position at Oxford. His scholarship and his fiction developed alongside each other, but this lecture is a work of literary criticism, not a Middle-earth story. It was published in 1937.