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
The Phoenix (Old English poem) relate Christianity to the text. The phoenix desires to be born again. Old English Christianity seems to have a generally fatalistic outlook on life. Themes of the inevitability of death and unhappy implications of the Final Judgment, for example, pervade other Old English poetry like Beowulf. Such does not seem to be the case with The Phoenix, which devotes passages to describing the beauty of its objects: the Garden of Eden and the Phoenix bird itself. The Phoenix conceptualizes existence as a continuous cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, using the analogy of “the nature of corn,” or the harvest.