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

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

Tolkien delivered the lecture at the British Academy in 1936, and it was published in the same year. He argued that critics had paid too much attention to the poem’s historical sources and not enough to its artistic design. In particular, he defended the importance of Beowulf’s monsters, Grendel and the dragon, as central to the poem rather than as distractions from its historical value.

The essay helped transform modern Beowulf scholarship. Tolkien presented the poem as a carefully structured work of literature whose themes include mortality, heroism, courage, and the limits of human power.

Readers sometimes connect the essay only with Tolkien’s fiction, but it was a serious work of medieval scholarship. Its argument also illuminates recurring concerns in Middle-earth, especially the relationship between heroic achievement and inevitable loss. The title is not The Monsters and the Critics alone; the full title begins with Beowulf.