J.R.R. Tolkien discussed Beowulf in his influential 1936 lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.”
The lecture argued that Beowulf should be valued as a work of poetry, not treated merely as a historical source about Anglo-Saxon society. Tolkien defended the poem’s monsters, especially Grendel and the dragon, as essential to its artistic structure rather than embarrassing distractions from its human or historical content.
The lecture was delivered at the British Academy and published in 1937. It became one of the most influential modern essays on Beowulf criticism. Tolkien’s professional study of Old English literature also informed his fiction: heroic cultures, ancient languages, elegiac loss, dragons, and the survival of stories across generations all recur in his Middle-earth writing. Beowulf itself is not a Tolkien novel, and its hero is not a character in The Lord of the Rings.