J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1936 lecture and essay, Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, focused on the Old English poem Beowulf.
The essay argued that scholars had undervalued the poem’s monsters, especially Grendel and the dragon, by treating them mainly as distractions from historical information. Tolkien maintained that the poem should be appreciated as a carefully constructed work of art.
His argument had a major influence on modern Beowulf scholarship. Tolkien’s expertise was particularly significant because he was a leading philologist and an Oxford professor of Anglo-Saxon. His approach helped shift attention toward the poem’s literary structure, themes, and imagination.
Tolkien also produced a prose translation of Beowulf, published posthumously as Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary in 2014. His own fiction was influenced by Germanic and Old English traditions, but Beowulf remained a real medieval poem rather than a Tolkien creation.