J.R.R. Tolkien discussed Beowulf in his famous 1936 lecture later published as the essay Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.
The lecture was delivered at Oxford and challenged the way many scholars approached the Old English poem. Tolkien argued that critics should take its monsters, especially Grendel and the dragon, seriously as central elements of the poem’s artistic design rather than treating them as distractions from historical information.
The essay helped redirect modern Beowulf scholarship toward the poem as literature. It also showed Tolkien’s ability to combine close philological knowledge with broad arguments about narrative structure, theme, and imagination.
Tolkien was not the translator of the surviving Old English poem in this lecture. He later produced a prose translation, published posthumously as Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary in 2014. The 1936 lecture and its essay remain the better-known landmarks in his Beowulf scholarship.