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

Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics was the title of J.R.R. Tolkien’s influential lecture and essay on the Old English epic.

Tolkien originally delivered the lecture at the British Academy in 1936, and it was published the same year. He argued that critics had focused too heavily on historical sources and linguistic details while failing to appreciate Beowulf as a coherent work of imaginative literature.

The essay defended the importance of the poem’s monsters, especially Grendel and the dragon, rather than treating them as distractions from a supposed historical core. Tolkien’s argument changed the direction of Beowulf scholarship and helped establish the poem as a major literary achievement. His expertise in Old English also influenced the languages, names, and heroic traditions in his fiction.