Who wrote the 1936 lecture Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics?

J. R. R. Tolkien wrote the 1936 lecture Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.

Tolkien delivered it on 25 November 1936 as the Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture at the British Academy. It was published that year in the Proceedings of the British Academy and quickly became one of the most influential works in modern Beowulf criticism.

The lecture challenged scholars who treated Beowulf mainly as evidence for Germanic history, archaeology, or language. Tolkien argued that the poem should be read as a crafted work of art, with its monsters—Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon—central rather than embarrassing distractions. He also emphasized the poem’s balance between Beowulf’s youthful victories and final battle in old age.

A frequent confusion is between this 1936 critical lecture and Tolkien’s own translation of Beowulf. His translation and commentary were published posthumously in 2014; they are related to the lecture but are not the work named in this question.