What was the title of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1936 lecture that defended monsters in Beowulf?

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

Tolkien delivered the lecture at the University of Oxford in 1936, and it was published in the same year. He argued that critics had focused too heavily on using Beowulf as evidence for history, language or Germanic culture and had undervalued the poem as a work of art.

The lecture defended the importance of the poem’s monsters, especially Grendel and the dragon. Tolkien saw them as central to the poem’s structure and meaning rather than as embarrassing distractions from supposedly more serious historical material.

The essay became one of the most influential modern studies of Beowulf and helped reshape literary criticism of Old English poetry. It also reveals Tolkien’s belief that mythic imagination and literary design deserve serious scholarly attention, an approach that connects his academic work with his fantasy writing.