J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1936 lecture “The Monsters and the Critics” discussed the Old English poem Beowulf.
Tolkien delivered the lecture at Oxford, where he was a leading scholar of Old English. He argued that critics had focused too heavily on historical details and had undervalued the poem’s artistic structure, especially its monsters and its treatment of mortality.
The lecture became one of the most influential modern essays on Beowulf. Tolkien presented the poem as a serious work of art rather than merely a source of information about Germanic history or society.
Beowulf tells of the hero Beowulf’s battles with Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and a dragon. Tolkien’s own fascination with heroic poetry, monsters, burial mounds, and northern myth is frequently discussed alongside his later fiction, but Beowulf remains an independent medieval poem, not a chapter of Middle-earth.