Which 1936 lecture by J.R.R. Tolkien helped establish Beowulf as serious literature?

Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics was J.R.R. Tolkien’s influential 1936 lecture on the Old English poem.

Tolkien delivered the lecture as the Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture at the British Academy on 25 November 1936. It was published in 1937 and argued that critics should treat Beowulf as a work of art rather than merely as evidence about ancient Germanic history, language, or archaeology.

He defended the poem’s monsters, especially Grendel and the dragon, as central to its structure and meaning. Earlier scholarship often treated those elements as distractions from the poem’s historical value. Tolkien’s argument helped redirect attention toward Beowulf’s literary design and lasting imaginative power.

The lecture also influenced Tolkien’s own fiction, although it was not a novel or a story set in Middle-earth. It is frequently confused with On Fairy-Stories, Tolkien’s later essay about fantasy, or with his famous 1931 Oxford lecture on Beowulf, which had a different context and title.