What was the title of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1936 lecture that influenced his essay On Fairy-Stories?

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

Tolkien delivered the lecture as the prestigious British Academy’s Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture on 25 November 1936. It argued that Beowulf should be appreciated as a carefully shaped poem, rather than treated mainly as a historical source about Germanic society.

He defended the importance of the poem’s monsters, especially Grendel and the dragon, claiming that they were central to its structure and meaning. This approach helped redirect Beowulf criticism toward literary analysis and away from a narrow focus on archaeology and historical background.

The lecture was published in 1937 and is frequently read alongside Tolkien’s essay On Fairy-Stories. It is not the same work as his translation of Beowulf or his later story Sellic Spell. Tolkien’s expertise in Old English literature strongly influenced the imaginative depth of his own fiction.