What was the title of Tolkien’s 1936 lecture that strongly influenced his essay on fantasy?

Tolkien’s 1936 lecture was titled Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.

Tolkien delivered the lecture at the University of Oxford in 1936. It challenged approaches that treated Beowulf mainly as an incomplete historical document or as a source of information about Germanic society. Tolkien argued that the poem should be valued as a work of art, with its monsters and central imaginative structure taken seriously.

The lecture became one of the most influential modern studies of Beowulf. It helped redirect scholarly attention toward the poem’s composition, symbolism, and artistic unity. Tolkien’s expertise in Old English gave the argument unusual authority, while his own imaginative response to dragons and heroic stories made the subject especially significant for his later readers.

The lecture is different from “On Fairy-Stories,” Tolkien’s later essay about fantasy, myth, and the functions of fairy stories. Both works discuss storytelling and imagination, but only the 1936 lecture bears the Beowulf title and focuses directly on the poem’s critics and monsters.