Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics give it a powerful effect. He rebuts suggestions that the poem is an epic or exciting narrative, likening it instead to a strong masonry structure built of blocks that fit together. He points out that the poem's theme is a serious one, mortality, and that the poem is in two parts: the first on Beowulf as a young man, defeating Grendel and his mother; the second on Beowulf in old age, going to his death fighting the dragon. The work has been praised by critics including the poet and "Beowulf" translator Seamus Heaney. Michael D. C. Drout called it the
Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics thinker, religiously enlightened, who let his mind play over a lost heroic world of the imagination", in other words that the "Beowulf" poet was a man much like Tolkien. Niles cited George Clark's observation that Tolkien left "Beowulf" scholars with the "myth of the poet as brooding intellectual, poised between a dying pagan world and a nascent Christian one." Niles noted that Tolkien's view of the melancholic vision of the "Beowulf" poet, and of the heroic fatalism of the poem's leading characters, was not wholly new, but that his view of the poet himself as a hero was. Joan Acocella,