What was the title of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1936 lecture that discussed Beowulf as literature?

J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1936 lecture on 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 valued as a work of literature and not treated merely as evidence for reconstructing Germanic history, mythology, or language. His approach helped change modern academic attitudes toward the poem.

The lecture defended the importance of the poem’s monsters, especially Grendel and the dragon. Tolkien argued that they were central to the poem’s design and meaning rather than embarrassing leftovers that critics should explain away. The essay became one of the most influential pieces of twentieth-century Beowulf scholarship.

The title is sometimes confused with On Fairy-Stories, another major Tolkien lecture and essay. The Battle of Maldon was also an Old English poem Tolkien studied, but it is not the title of his famous 1936 Beowulf address.