What was the title of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1936 lecture that influenced his essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”?

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. The work argued that Beowulf should be valued as a poem rather than treated merely as an incomplete historical document. Tolkien emphasized the artistic importance of its monsters, especially Grendel and the dragon, which many earlier scholars had regarded as distractions from the poem’s supposed historical content.

The lecture became one of the most influential modern pieces of Beowulf criticism. Its central approach helped reshape how readers and scholars viewed the poem’s structure, symbolism, and literary achievement.

The essay is also important for understanding Tolkien’s fiction. His respect for mythic monsters and heroic literature informed his creative work, but the lecture is a scholarly argument, not a chapter from Middle-earth. “On Fairy-Stories” is another famous Tolkien essay, published later in a different context.