What was the title of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1936 lecture that influenced The Hobbit?

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

Tolkien delivered the lecture at the British Academy on 25 November 1936. He argued that critics should take Beowulf’s monsters seriously as central artistic elements rather than treating them as distractions from historical information about Anglo-Saxon society.

The lecture is important to Tolkien’s literary reputation and to the background of his fiction. Its defense of imaginative myth, monsters, and the poem’s structure helped establish a modern approach to Beowulf. The Hobbit was already in development by then, and the lecture’s attention to dragons and heroic literature is often discussed alongside Tolkien’s creative work, though it was not a direct adaptation of Beowulf.