Which 1936 essay by J.R.R. Tolkien became influential in modern Beowulf criticism?

“Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” is J.R.R. Tolkien’s influential 1936 essay on the Old English poem.

Tolkien first delivered the work as a lecture at the British Academy on 25 November 1936. He argued that critics had too often treated Beowulf as a damaged historical document or a source of information about early Germanic life. Instead, he emphasized the poem’s artistic unity and the importance of its monsters to its meaning.

His argument helped change the direction of Beowulf scholarship. Tolkien presented the poem’s battles with Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon as central structural elements rather than embarrassing leftovers from primitive storytelling.

The essay is also significant because it shows Tolkien applying literary criticism to the same imaginative materials that interested him as a writer. It does not claim that Beowulf was a fantasy novel in the modern commercial sense; it defends the poem as serious literature whose supernatural elements are artistically essential.