Which 1936 lecture by J.R.R. Tolkien became influential in the study of Beowulf?

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

Tolkien delivered the lecture as the Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture at the British Academy in 1936. It challenged approaches that treated Beowulf mainly as a source of historical information or as a flawed collection of unrelated episodes.

He argued that the poem should be appreciated as a coherent work of art, with its monsters—especially Grendel, his mother, and the dragon—central to its meaning. The lecture helped change modern academic attitudes toward the poem.

The work is often cited simply as “The Monsters and the Critics,” but its full title begins with Beowulf. It is a scholarly lecture, not one of Tolkien’s fictional stories.