Beowulf is the Old English epic J.R.R. Tolkien studied in his 1936 lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” The lecture was delivered at Oxford and later published in 1937.
Tolkien argued that Beowulf should be valued as a work of poetry rather than treated merely as historical evidence or a source for studying Germanic culture. He emphasized the poem’s structure, its monsters, and the balance between its youthful and tragic episodes.
The lecture became one of the most influential modern works of Beowulf criticism. Tolkien’s familiarity with the poem also affected his fiction: scholars often discuss connections between Beowulf’s dragon, its heroic world, and elements of Tolkien’s own stories. The other choices are Old English poems, but none is the subject named in the lecture’s title.