J.R.R. Tolkien analyzed Beowulf in his influential 1936 lecture.
The lecture was titled “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” and was delivered at the British Academy in London on 25 November 1936. Tolkien argued that the poem should be valued as a work of art rather than treated merely as a historical source or a collection of folklore.
He defended the importance of the poem’s monsters, especially Grendel and the dragon. In Tolkien’s view, these figures were central to the poem’s structure and meaning, not distractions from its supposedly more serious historical material. The lecture helped redirect academic attention toward Beowulf’s literary qualities.
Beowulf is an Old English heroic poem about a warrior who fights Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and later a dragon. Tolkien’s scholarship and teaching in Old English strongly influenced his own interest in myth, heroic literature, and invented languages.