J.R.R. Tolkien wrote his major 1936 scholarly study about the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf.
His lecture, later published as the essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” was delivered at Oxford in 1936. Tolkien argued that scholars had undervalued the poem by treating its monsters as distractions from historical or linguistic evidence. He insisted that Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon were central to the poem’s artistic design.
The essay became highly influential in Beowulf studies. It helped shift critical attention toward the poem as a work of literature rather than merely a source of information about early Germanic history. Tolkien’s expertise in Old English strongly shaped his interpretation.
The study is not a translation of Beowulf and does not retell its story. Tolkien later translated the poem himself, but that translation was published posthumously in 2014 as Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary.