What was the title of Tolkien’s 1936 lecture that influenced his ideas about fantasy literature?

Tolkien’s 1936 lecture that influenced his ideas about fantasy literature was titled Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics. It was first delivered at Oxford and later published as a major scholarly essay.

The lecture argued that Beowulf should be valued as a work of poetry, not treated merely as a historical document or a source of information about Germanic society. Tolkien emphasized the poem’s artistic structure and defended the importance of its monsters, especially Grendel and the dragon.

This argument mattered because some earlier scholarship had focused heavily on reconstructing history from Beowulf. Tolkien instead encouraged readers to consider how the poem’s imaginative elements create meaning. His approach helped reshape modern academic discussion of the Old English epic.

The lecture also illuminates Tolkien’s own fiction. He believed that monsters, myth, and imaginative distance could carry serious emotional and moral ideas. Although the essay is not a guidebook to Middle-earth, it reveals why Tolkien treated dragons, heroic legends, and ancient literary traditions as central subjects rather than childish distractions.