What was the title of J.R.R. Tolkien’s first academic publication on Beowulf?

J.R.R. Tolkien’s landmark lecture was titled Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics. He delivered it as the Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture at the British Academy in 1936.

The lecture argued that critics had paid too much attention to using Beowulf as historical evidence and not enough attention to its artistic structure. Tolkien defended the poem as a unified work of literature, emphasizing the importance of its monsters, including Grendel and the dragon.

The essay became one of the most influential modern studies of Beowulf. It helped shift scholarly attention toward the poem’s imaginative and literary qualities, not merely its value as a source about Anglo-Saxon society.

The title is sometimes remembered incorrectly because Tolkien wrote and taught extensively about Old English texts. Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics is specifically the title of the 1936 lecture and its published essay, not the name of a translation or a Tolkien-authored retelling of the poem.