Beowulf was a major scholarly subject for J.R.R. Tolkien.
Tolkien was an influential scholar of Old English literature, especially the early medieval poem Beowulf. His 1936 lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” helped redirect academic attention toward the poem’s artistry and structure rather than treating it mainly as a historical source.
Beowulf tells of the hero Beowulf’s battles with Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and a dragon. Tolkien’s engagement with the poem also shaped the way readers discuss monsters, heroic journeys, and northern European myth in his fiction. Beowulf is not a Tolkien novel and is not set in Middle-earth; it is an earlier English epic that influenced his scholarly and imaginative work.