J.R.R. Tolkien’s famous 1936 essay discussed the medieval poem Beowulf.
The essay, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” grew from Tolkien’s 1936 lecture and was published later that year. Tolkien 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 information about Anglo-Saxon society.
Beowulf is an Old English epic poem about a hero who fights Grendel, Grendel’s mother and a dragon. Tolkien’s scholarship helped reshape modern academic appreciation of the poem as a work of literature. His argument also showed how his philological expertise influenced his understanding of myth, monsters and heroic storytelling.
Beowulf is not a Tolkien novel, although its themes and language influenced his imagination. The poem predates Tolkien by many centuries and survives in a single medieval manuscript, commonly dated to around the year 1000.