Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics most important article ever written about the poem. Scholars of Anglo-Saxon agree that the work was influential, transforming the study of "Beowulf". J. R. R. Tolkien's essay ""Beowulf": The Monsters and the Critics", initially delivered as a lecture in 1936, is regarded as a formative work in modern "Beowulf" studies. In it, Tolkien speaks against critics who play down the monsters in the poem, namely Grendel, Grendel's mother, and the dragon, in favour of using "Beowulf" solely as a source for Anglo-Saxon history. Tolkien argues that rather than being merely extraneous, these elements are key to the narrative and should
Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics young Beowulf and the old Hrothgar. The poem's metre, too, is founded on a balance of two halves to each line, "more like masonry than music". Tolkien argues that the poem is not meant to be an exciting narrative, nor a romantic story, but a word-picture, "a method and structure that ... approaches rather to sculpture or painting. It is a composition not a tune." Far from being weakly structured, it "is curiously strong". It Tolkien takes a moment to dismiss another criticism, that monsters should not have been made to appear in both halves. He replies he can see