Beowulf is the Old English poem at the center of J.R.R. Tolkien’s lecture “The Monsters and the Critics.”
Tolkien delivered the lecture in 1936, arguing that scholars should take the poem’s monsters and imaginative structure seriously rather than treating them as distractions from historical information. His discussion helped change the way Beowulf was studied as a work of literature.
The poem tells of Beowulf’s battles with Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and a dragon. Tolkien’s scholarship did not simply identify him with the poem’s hero; instead, it examined the artistic balance and underlying design of the text. The lecture was later published and became one of Tolkien’s best-known academic works.