Beowulf is the Old English epic Tolkien translated and taught at Oxford.
Tolkien was a major scholar of Old English literature and language. His famous 1936 lecture, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” argued that the poem should be valued as a work of art rather than treated merely as a source of historical information. The lecture strongly influenced modern Beowulf scholarship.
Tolkien also produced a prose translation of Beowulf, though it was not published during his lifetime. It appeared posthumously in 2014 as Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, edited by his son Christopher Tolkien. The volume includes Tolkien’s commentary and the associated story “Sellic Spell.”
The poem follows Beowulf’s battles with Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and a dragon. Tolkien’s scholarly engagement with such texts helped shape the imaginative and linguistic interests visible in his fiction, without making Beowulf a direct sourcebook for Middle-earth.