Beowulf was the medieval English poem discussed in J.R.R. Tolkien’s influential 1936 lecture “The Monsters and the Critics.”
Tolkien delivered the lecture at Oxford, and it was published in 1937. He argued that critics should take the poem’s monsters seriously as central elements of its artistic design, rather than treating them as distractions from historical or linguistic information. His approach helped establish Beowulf as a major work of literature, not merely a source of facts about early Germanic society.
Tolkien’s expertise in Old English made him especially important to the study of Beowulf. He also translated and taught the poem, and its themes of courage, mortality, fame and a doomed heroic world resonated with ideas found in his own fiction.
The Canterbury Tales and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are important medieval English works, but neither was the subject of this lecture. The Dream of the Rood is an Old English religious poem and is likewise a separate text.