Beowulf was the Old English poem that J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1936 lecture helped bring into modern literary focus.
Tolkien’s lecture, later published as the essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” argued that scholars should take the poem’s monsters and heroic storytelling seriously as central artistic features. Earlier scholarship had often treated Beowulf mainly as evidence about Germanic history, language, or culture.
Tolkien emphasized the poem’s structure, imagery, and balance between youth and age, especially through its two major fights: Beowulf’s battle with Grendel and the later battle with a dragon. His argument helped influence the way Beowulf was taught and studied as literature.
The lecture did not discover Beowulf or translate it. Tolkien’s contribution was critical: he changed the emphasis of academic discussion. The poem survives in a single medieval manuscript and is written in Old English, the language of Anglo-Saxon England.