Which 1936 lecture by J.R.R. Tolkien influenced modern Beowulf scholarship?

Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics was the 1936 lecture by J.R.R. Tolkien that helped reshape modern Beowulf scholarship.

Tolkien delivered the lecture at Oxford on 25 November 1936. He argued that critics had undervalued the poem by treating its monsters as distractions from historical or linguistic evidence. In his view, Beowulf’s dragons and Grendel were central to the poem’s artistic design, not embarrassing leftovers.

The lecture was published in 1937 and became one of Tolkien’s most influential scholarly works. It helped encourage readers to study Beowulf as a poem rather than only as a historical source. The essay is also important for understanding Tolkien’s own fiction: his interest in monsters, heroic literature, and the tension between mortality and legend appears in both his scholarship and Middle-earth stories.