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

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

Tolkien delivered Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics as a lecture at the British Academy in 1936. It argued that critics had undervalued the poem’s monsters and had focused too heavily on historical or linguistic details at the expense of its artistic structure.

The lecture helped change modern approaches to Beowulf. Tolkien maintained that Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon were not embarrassing additions to a historical document; they were central to the poem’s design and meaning. His argument also connected the poem’s treatment of mortality, courage, and defeat.

The title is sometimes confused with Tolkien’s translations and other essays about Old English literature. The 1936 lecture is especially important because it helped establish Beowulf as a work of literary art worthy of sustained critical study, not merely a source for reconstructing early Germanic history.