J. R. R. Tolkien E. Nicholson said that the article Tolkien wrote about "Beowulf" is "widely recognized as a turning point in Beowulfian criticism", noting that Tolkien established the primacy of the poetic nature of the work as opposed to its purely linguistic elements. At the time, the consensus of scholarship deprecated "Beowulf" for dealing with childish battles with monsters rather than realistic tribal warfare; Tolkien argued that the author of "Beowulf" was addressing human destiny in general, not as limited by particular tribal politics, and therefore the monsters were essential to the poem. Where "Beowulf" does deal with specific tribal struggles, as at
U. S. R. Murty U. S. R. Murty Uppaluri Siva Ramachandra Murty, or U. S. R. Murty (as he prefers to write his name), is a Professor Emeritus of the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization, University of Waterloo. U. S. R. Murty received his Ph.D. in 1967 from the Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta, with a thesis on extremal graph theory; his advisor was C. R. Rao. Murty is well known for his work in matroid theory and graph theory, and mainly for being a co-author with J. A. Bondy of a textbook on graph theory. Murty has served as a managing editor and co-editor-in-chief