J.R.R. Tolkien’s famous 1936 essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” concerns the Old English epic Beowulf.
Tolkien delivered the lecture at the University of Oxford in 1936, and it was published later that year. The essay argued that scholars had undervalued the poem’s monsters, especially Grendel and the dragon, by treating them as distractions from historical or linguistic evidence.
Tolkien presented Beowulf as a unified work of imaginative art. He compared its structure to a tower and emphasized the importance of the poem’s tragic balance between heroic achievement and inevitable loss. The lecture helped reshape modern academic approaches to the poem.
Beowulf was not written by Tolkien and is not a Middle-earth story. However, its dragons, heroic battles, elegiac tone, and Old English language deeply interested him. Tolkien’s scholarship and fiction developed in constant conversation with early medieval literature.