Which Tolkien essay, published in 1936, became a landmark study of the poem Beowulf?

Tolkien’s 1936 essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” became a landmark study of the Old English poem.

The essay originated as a lecture delivered at Oxford in 1936 and was published the same year. Tolkien argued that scholars had paid too much attention to historical information extracted from Beowulf and too little attention to the poem as a work of art.

He defended the importance of the poem’s monsters, especially Grendel and the dragon, rather than treating them as distractions from supposedly more serious historical material. Tolkien presented the poem as a carefully structured meditation on courage, mortality, and the human struggle against overwhelming forces.

The essay strongly influenced later Beowulf scholarship. It also helps explain why monsters, heroic tragedy, and mythic structure mattered so much in Tolkien’s own fiction. The work is scholarly criticism, not a retelling or translation of Beowulf.