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
The dragon (Beowulf) referred to in language which is meant to recall the powers of darkness which Christian men felt themselves to be encompassed. They are 'inmates of hell', 'adversaries of God', 'offspring of Cain', 'enemies of mankind'...And so Beowulf, for all that he moves in the world of the primitive Heroic Age of the Germans, nevertheless is almost a Christian knight". Peter Gainsford noted in the article "The Deaths of Beowulf and Odysseus: Narrative Time and Mythological Tale Types" that "In the twenty-first century "Beowulf" does not lack for commentators to defend the literary merit of the dragon episode". Adrien Bonjour opined