J.R.R. Tolkien studied and translated the Old English poem Beowulf.
Tolkien was a leading philologist and spent much of his academic career teaching Old and Middle English. Beowulf, an epic poem preserved in a manuscript dating from around the year 1000, was central to his scholarship. It tells of the hero Beowulf’s battles with Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and a dragon.
His influential 1936 lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” argued that the poem should be valued as a work of art, not treated merely as historical evidence or a source of linguistic data. Tolkien also produced a prose translation, published posthumously as Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary in 2014.
The Wanderer and The Seafarer are also important Old English poems, and Tolkien knew them well, but they are not the work most closely associated with his major Beowulf scholarship.