What was the title of J.R.R. Tolkien’s lecture later published as the essay Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics?

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

Tolkien delivered Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics as a lecture at the British Academy on 25 November 1936. It was later published in 1937 and became one of the most influential modern essays on the Old English epic Beowulf.

The essay argued that critics had undervalued the poem by treating its monsters as distractions from its historical or cultural information. Tolkien maintained that Grendel, Grendel’s mother and the dragon are central to the poem’s design and that the work should be understood as a unified artistic creation.

The essay is important for understanding Tolkien as a scholar, not only as a novelist. Its ideas also illuminate his own interest in myth, monsters, heroic tragedy and the relationship between past traditions and new literary works. It is sometimes confused with On Fairy-Stories, another major Tolkien lecture and essay, but that work addresses the nature and functions of fairy stories rather than Beowulf specifically.