Which 1936 Tolkien lecture transformed scholarly views of the Old English poem Beowulf?

Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics was the 1936 Tolkien lecture that transformed scholarly views of Beowulf.

Tolkien delivered the lecture as the Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture at the British Academy on 25 November 1936. He argued that critics had paid too much attention to using Beowulf as historical evidence and too little attention to its artistic structure. In particular, he defended the poem’s monsters as central to its meaning rather than as embarrassing distractions.

The lecture helped establish Beowulf as a serious work of literature for modern literary study. Tolkien’s approach influenced later scholarship by treating the poem’s imagery, balance, and tragic design as essential. The text was published in 1937, the same year that The Hobbit appeared, although the lecture belongs to Tolkien’s academic career rather than his Middle-earth fiction.