What was the title of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1936 lecture that reshaped modern scholarly discussion of Beowulf?

The title of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1936 lecture that reshaped modern scholarly discussion of Beowulf was “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.”

Tolkien delivered the lecture at Oxford in 1936, and it was published in the same year. He argued that earlier scholars had focused too heavily on historical details and treated the poem’s monsters as distractions from its supposedly more serious material. Tolkien instead maintained that Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon were central to the poem’s design.

The lecture helped change the critical reputation of Beowulf by presenting it as a coherent work of imaginative literature rather than merely a source of linguistic or historical evidence. Tolkien’s expertise as an Old English scholar informed the argument, but his emphasis on structure, theme, and artistry also influenced later literary criticism. The title is sometimes shortened informally, but the canonical published title includes both “The Monsters” and “The Critics.”