The poem that inspired J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1936 lecture was Beowulf.
Tolkien delivered “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” as a lecture at the British Academy. He argued that scholars had undervalued the poem’s artistic unity by treating it mainly as a historical source or as evidence for Germanic folklore.
Tolkien emphasized the poem’s monsters—Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon—as central to its structure and meaning. His argument helped redirect modern Beowulf studies toward the poem as a work of literature, not merely a storehouse of information about early medieval society.
Beowulf is an Old English epic preserved in a single medieval manuscript. Tolkien’s expertise in Old English also influenced his fiction, including the names, languages, and heroic traditions found in Middle-earth.