Which Tolkien work was published in 1936 as a scholarly essay about the poem Beowulf?

Tolkien’s 1936 scholarly essay about Beowulf was titled Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.

Tolkien delivered the work as a lecture at the British Academy in 1936, and it was published that year. The essay argued that Beowulf should be valued as a work of imaginative literature, not merely mined for information about Germanic history, religion, or archaeology.

He emphasized the poem’s monsters—especially Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon—as central to its artistic design. Earlier scholars had often treated these supernatural elements as distractions from the historical material. Tolkien instead argued that the poem’s structure and themes depend on the conflict between human life and forces of destruction.

The essay became one of the most influential modern studies of Beowulf. It also illustrates why Tolkien’s fiction should not be separated completely from his scholarship: his sensitivity to language, myth, and narrative structure shaped both his academic arguments and his creative work.