What was Tolkien’s 1936 lecture on the poem Beowulf titled?

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

He delivered the lecture as the Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture at the British Academy in London. Tolkien argued that Beowulf should be treated as a unified work of literature, not simply mined for information about Germanic history or archaeological details. His discussion restored the poem’s monsters, including Grendel and the dragon, to the center of critical attention.

The lecture became one of the most influential works of modern Beowulf scholarship. Tolkien’s approach also reflected his own expertise as a philologist and literary historian. Although he later became famous primarily as the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, his academic writing had a major independent impact. The lecture was published in 1937 and remains widely assigned in courses on Old English literature.