What was the title of J.R.R. Tolkien’s lecture that inspired his essay on Beowulf?

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

Tolkien first delivered the lecture at Oxford in 1936, and it was published as an essay the same year. The work argued that scholars had undervalued Beowulf as a poem by concentrating too heavily on historical and linguistic evidence rather than appreciating its artistic structure.

Tolkien defended the importance of the poem’s monsters, especially Grendel and the dragon. He argued that these figures were not accidental decorations but central to the poem’s design and meaning. This approach helped redirect modern Beowulf criticism toward the poem as literature.

The essay is not the same as Tolkien’s “On Fairy-Stories,” another important lecture later published in essay form. Tolkien’s Beowulf scholarship also influenced his own fiction, but the lecture’s subject was the Old English poem, not a direct explanation of Middle-earth.