Beowulf The Monsters and the Critics

"Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" was a 1936 lecture given by J. R. R. Tolkien on literary criticism on the Old English heroic epic poem Beowulf. It was first published in that year in Proceedings of the British Academy, and has since been reprinted in many collections, including in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, the 1983 collection of Tolkien's academic papers edited by Christopher Tolkien.