What was the title of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1936 lecture that influenced modern Beowulf criticism?

J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1936 lecture was titled Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics. He delivered it at the University of Oxford, and it was published in 1937.

The lecture argued that Beowulf should be valued as a work of poetry, not merely mined as evidence about Germanic history or folklore. Tolkien emphasized the poem’s structure and the artistic importance of its monsters, especially Grendel and the dragon.

The essay became highly influential in Beowulf scholarship. Its title reflects Tolkien’s response to critics who treated the poem’s supernatural elements as distractions from its historical material. Tolkien instead presented those elements as central to the poem’s design and meaning.

The lecture also reveals the connection between Tolkien’s academic expertise and his fiction. His knowledge of Old English, mythology, and medieval literature informed his imaginative work, but this piece was a scholarly argument about an existing epic rather than a Middle-earth story.