Which 1936 Tolkien essay is famous for defending the monsters in the Old English poem Beowulf?

“Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” is Tolkien’s famous 1936 essay defending the poem’s monsters as central artistic elements.

Tolkien delivered it as the Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture at the British Academy on 25 November 1936. He argued that critics had undervalued Beowulf by treating its monsters as irrelevant interruptions rather than as the organizing subjects of the poem’s structure and theme.

The essay helped redirect Beowulf scholarship toward close literary interpretation instead of treating the poem mainly as historical evidence. Tolkien’s expertise in Old English informed both his academic career and his fiction. “On Fairy-Stories” is his separate essay about fantasy, while “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth” concerns a later Old English battle poem.