The Old English poem discussed in J.R.R. Tolkien’s influential 1936 lecture was Beowulf. His lecture, later published as the essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” argued that the poem deserved to be valued as a work of art, not merely as evidence for history or language study.
Tolkien emphasized the poem’s structure, symbolism, and treatment of monsters, especially Grendel and the dragon. He rejected approaches that treated its supernatural elements as embarrassing leftovers and instead presented them as central to its artistic design.
The lecture became one of the most important modern essays on Beowulf. Tolkien’s expertise in Old English also shaped his fiction: names, heroic themes, dragon lore, riddling, and the tension between courage and mortality recur throughout Middle-earth. Beowulf itself survives in a single medieval manuscript, commonly dated to the early eleventh century.