Which Oxford lecture by J.R.R. Tolkien was published in 1936 and transformed Beowulf criticism?

J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1936 lecture that transformed Beowulf criticism was Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.

Tolkien delivered the lecture as the Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture at the British Academy on 25 November 1936. It was published the following year. In it, Tolkien argued that critics had undervalued the poem by treating its monsters as secondary material rather than as central to its artistic structure.

He presented Beowulf as a coherent work of imagination, not merely a historical document or a source for studying Germanic customs. Tolkien’s famous image of a tower emphasizes how a poem should be appreciated as a constructed artistic achievement rather than dismantled solely for the stones used to build it.

The lecture remains one of the most influential modern essays on the Old English poem. It is often confused with On Fairy-Stories, another important Tolkien lecture and essay, but that work addresses fantasy, recovery, escape, and consolation rather than primarily the critical interpretation of Beowulf.