Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics writing in "The New Yorker", calls it "a paper that many people regard as not just the finest essay on the poem but one of the finest essays on English literature." She adds that "Tolkien preferred the monsters to the critics." Regina Weinreich, reviewing "The Monsters and the Critics: And Other Essays" in "The New York Times", wrote that the title essay "revolutionized the study of the early English poem "Beowulf," in which a young hero crushes a human-handed monster called Grendel. Against the scorn of critics, Tolkien defends the centrality and seriousness of literary monsters, declaring his own belief
Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics wrote that the "epoch-making paper" stood out in considering "Beowulf" as literature. Heaney argued that Tolkien "took for granted the poem's integrity and distinction as a work of art", and showed how the poem achieved that status: Heaney called the paper's literary treatment "brilliant". He suggested that it had changed the way that "Beowulf" was valued, and that it had started "a new era of appreciation" of the poem. Tolkien's own translation of "Beowulf", published posthumously in 2014 as "", has been linked to the essay. Shippey has argued that the translation throws light on "what Tolkien really thought in