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 was made early on by Guðbrandur Vigfússon (1878). "Grettis saga" is a family saga, and a story about , a great-grandson of an Icelandic settler, cannot be comparably as old as "Beowulf". Axel Olrik (1903) claimed that on the contrary, this saga was a reworking of "Beowulf", and others had followed suit. However, (1910) wrote a thesis in which both "Beowulf" and "Grettis saga" drew from a common folkloric source, and this encouraged even a detractor such W. W. Lawrence to reposition his view, and entertain the possibility that certain elements in the saga (such as the waterfall in place