Which Tolkien work was published in 1936 from his lecture on Beowulf?

The Tolkien work published in 1936 from his lecture on Beowulf was Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.

Tolkien originally delivered the lecture at the British Academy in 1936. He argued that Beowulf should be valued as a work of poetry, not merely mined as evidence about Germanic history, language, or folklore. His approach strongly influenced later Beowulf scholarship.

The essay redirected attention toward the poem’s artistic structure, especially its treatment of monsters, mortality, and the tension between heroic achievement and inevitable loss. Tolkien’s discussion of Grendel, his mother, and the dragon became widely influential.

This work is separate from On Fairy-Stories, which developed from Tolkien’s 1939 Andrew Lang Lecture. Both texts are important pieces of Tolkien’s literary criticism, but they address different subjects and originated in different lectures.