J.R.R. Tolkien discussed Beowulf in his famous 1936 lecture, The Monsters and the Critics.
He delivered the lecture at the British Academy on 25 November 1936. Tolkien argued that scholars had placed too much emphasis on using Beowulf as historical evidence and had not paid enough attention to its artistic structure and poetic power.
The lecture helped reshape modern criticism of the Old English poem. Tolkien defended the importance of its monsters, especially Grendel and the dragon, arguing that they were central to the poem rather than embarrassing distractions from a supposed historical core.
Beowulf survives in a single manuscript dating from around the turn of the first millennium. The poem tells of a hero who fights Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and later a dragon. Tolkien’s scholarship on Old English literature also influenced the imaginative texture of his own fiction.