What was the title of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1936 lecture that helped renew interest in Beowulf as literature?

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

Tolkien delivered the lecture at Oxford in 1936, and it was published in 1937. He argued that Beowulf should be studied as a work of art rather than treated mainly as a source of historical information about Anglo-Saxon life.

The lecture defended the poem’s monsters, especially Grendel and the dragon, as central to its structure and meaning. Tolkien maintained that critics had overlooked the poem’s artistic unity by concentrating too heavily on fragmentary history, folklore, or linguistic evidence.

The essay became one of the most influential modern discussions of Beowulf. Its importance reaches beyond Tolkien studies because it helped establish a literary approach to Old English poetry. The lecture also shows how Tolkien’s scholarship and imaginative writing were connected: he understood mythic monsters as essential to a story’s design.