Which Tolkien essay is famous for discussing the Old English poem Beowulf?

Tolkien’s famous Beowulf essay is titled Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics. He delivered it as a lecture at Oxford in 1936, and it was published in 1937.

The essay argued that critics should take Beowulf’s monsters seriously rather than treating them as secondary distractions from historical information. Tolkien presented the poem as a unified work of art, emphasizing its structure, symbolism, and treatment of mortality.

The lecture helped change modern scholarly attitudes toward Beowulf. Tolkien was also a major philologist and Old English expert, so his argument combined literary interpretation with close attention to language and textual tradition. The essay is separate from On Fairy-Stories, which addresses fantasy, myth, and the functions of fairy stories.