What was Tolkien’s 1936 lecture and essay about the Old English poem Beowulf called?

Tolkien’s 1936 lecture and essay about Beowulf was called Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.

Tolkien delivered the lecture at the British Academy on 25 November 1936. It argued that Beowulf should be valued as a work of art rather than treated merely as historical evidence about Anglo-Saxon society. He emphasized the poem’s central imaginative structure, especially its confrontations with Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon.

The essay became one of the most influential works of modern Beowulf criticism. Tolkien maintained that the monsters were not embarrassing distractions from the poem’s serious themes; they were essential to its design and meaning.

The title is sometimes confused with Tolkien’s other scholarly writings, including “On Fairy-Stories.” The Beowulf essay is distinctive because it directly reshaped academic views of the poem and its monsters.