Beowulf: The Monsters and the

Critics
"Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" was a 1936 lecture
given by J. R. R. Tolkien on literary criticism on the Old English
heroic epic poem Beowulf. It was first published as a paper in that
year in the Proceedings of the British Academy, and has since been
reprinted in many collections.

Tolkien argues that the original poem has almost been lost under
the weight of the scholarship on it; that Beowulf must be seen as a
poem, not just as a historical document; and that the quality of its
verse and its structure 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 Title page of Beowulf: The Monsters
Beowulf translator Seamus Heaney. Michael D. C. Drout called it and the Critics, 1936
the most important article ever written about the poem.[1] Scholars
of Anglo-Saxon agree that the work was influential, transforming
the study of Beowulf.

Contents
Overview
Tolkien's argument
Rebuttal of earlier critics
Man in a hostile world
Structure: youth versus age
A singular effect
Reception
Scholars
Press
Translator
New light from Tolkien's Beowulf translation
 Editions
Translations
See also
References
Sources

Overview
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.[2][3][4][5][6][7] 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 be the focus of study. In doing so he drew attention to the
previously neglected literary qualities of the poem and argued that it should be studied as a work of art, not
just as a historical document.[8] Later critics such as Hugh Magennis who agree with Tolkien on this point have
cited him to defend their arguments.[9]

The essay is a redacted version of a series of lectures that Tolkien delivered to Oxford undergraduates in the
1930s.[10] Notes for these lectures exist in two manuscript versions published together in 2002 as Beowulf and
the Critics, edited by Michael D. C. Drout; these offer some insight into the development of Tolkien's thinking
on the poem, especially his much-quoted metaphor of the material of the poem as a tower.[10] "Beowulf: The
Monsters and the Critics" is available in various collections including the 1983 The Monsters and the Critics
and Other Essays edited by Christopher Tolkien.

Tolkien's argument

Rebuttal of earlier critics

Tolkien begins by noting that the original book has almost been lost under the extensive " ‘literature’ "[11] [his
inverted commas] on the subject. He explains that Beowulf had mainly been quarried as "an historical
document",[12] and that most of the praise and censure of the poem was due to beliefs that it was "something
that it was not – for example, primitive, pagan, Teutonic, an allegory (political or mythical), or most often, an
epic;"[13] or because the scholar would have liked it to be something else, such as "a heathen heroic lay, a
history of Sweden, a manual of Germanic antiquities, or a Nordic Summa Theologica."[13] Tolkien gives an
allegory of a man who inherits a field full of stone from an old hall. He builds a tower with some of it, but when
people find the stones are older than the tower, they pull it down "to look for hidden carvings and
inscriptions".[14]

Tolkien quotes at length what the scholar W. P. Ker thought of Beowulf, namely that "there is nothing much in
the story", and that "the great beauty, the real value, of Beowulf is in its dignity of style". Tolkien notes that
Ker's opinion had been a powerful influence in favour of a paradoxical contrast between the poem's supposed
defect in speaking of monsters, and (in Tolkien's words) its agreed "dignity, loftiness in converse, and well-
wrought finish".[15] Tolkien cites other critics, such as Raymond Wilson
Chambers and Ritchie Girvan, who objected to the poem's "wilderness of
dragons" and its unworthy choice of theme. Tolkien finds it improbable that
"a mind lofty and thoughtful", as evidenced by the quality of the poetry,
"would write more than three thousand lines (wrought to a high finish) on
matter that is really not worth serious attention".[16] He notes that heroic
human stories had been held to be superior to myth, but argues that myth
has a special value: "For myth is alive at once and in all its parts, and dies
before it can be dissected."[17] Finally Tolkien states directly "We do not
deny the worth of the hero by accepting Grendel and the dragon."[18]

Man in a hostile world Tolkien's essay repeatedly

responds to comments by
In Tolkien's view, the poem is essentially about a "man at war with the
William Paton Ker. Late
hostile world, and his inevitable overthrow in Time". The underlying 19th century portrait by
tragedy is man's brief mortal life. Grendel and the dragon are identified as Johnston Forbes-Robertson
enemies of a Christian God, unlike the monsters encountered by Odysseus
on his travels.[19] What had happened is that Northern courage, exultant,
defiant in the face of inevitable defeat by "Chaos and Unreason" (Tolkien cites Ker's words), fuses with a
Christian faith and outlook.[20] The Beowulf poet uses both what he knew to be the old heroic tradition,
darkened by distance in time, along with the newly acquired Christian tradition. The Christian, Tolkien notes,
is "hemmed in a hostile world", and the monsters are evil spirits: but as the transition was incomplete in the
poem, the monsters remain real and the focus remains "an ancient theme: that man, each man and all men,
and all their works shall die".[21]

Tolkien returns to the monsters, and regrets we know so little about pre-Christian English mythology; he
resorts instead to Icelandic myth, which he argues must have had a similar attitude to monsters, men and
gods. The Northern gods, like men, are doomed to die. The Southern (Roman and Greek) pagan gods were
immortal, so to Tolkien (a Christian), the Southern religion "must go forward to philosophy or relapse into
anarchy":[22] death and the monsters are peripheral. But the Northern myths, and Beowulf, put the monsters,
mortality and death in the centre. Tolkien is therefore very interested in the contact of Northern and Christian
thought in the poem, where the scriptural Cain is linked to eotenas (giants) and ylfe (elves), not through
confusion but "an indication of the precise point at which an imagination, pondering old and new, was
kindled".[23] The poem is, Tolkien states, "an historical poem about the pagan past, or an attempt at one",
obviously not with modern ideas of "literal historical fidelity".[23] The poet takes an old plot (a marauding
monster troubling the Scylding court) paints a vivid picture of the old days, for instance using the Old
Testament image of the shepherd patriarchs of Israel in the folces hyrde (people's shepherd) of the Danes.[24]

Structure: youth versus age

The general structure of the poem is then clear, writes Tolkien. "It is
essentially a balance, an opposition of ends and beginnings. In its simplest
terms it is a contrasted description of two moments in a great life, rising
and setting; an elaboration of the ancient and intensely moving contrast
between youth and age, first achievement and final death."[25] Part A
(youth) is lines 1 to 2199; part B (age) is lines 2200 to 3182 (the end).[25]

A secondary division of the poem occurs, Tolkien writes, at line 1887, after
which all the earlier story is summarized, so a complete account of
Beowulf's tragedy is given between 1888 and the end, but without the
account of the gloomy court of Heorot, or of the contrast between the young
Beowulf and the old Hrothgar.

The poem's metre, too, is founded on a balance of two halves to each line,
"more like masonry than music".[26] Tolkien argues that the poem is not
meant to be an exciting narrative, nor a romantic story, but a word-picture, First folio of the Beowulf
manuscript, c. 975-1025
"a method and structure that ... approaches rather to sculpture or painting.
It is a composition not a tune."[26] Far from being weakly structured, it "is
curiously strong".[26]

It is not an 'epic', nor even a magnified 'lay'. No terms borrowed from Greek or other literatures
exactly fit: there is no reason why they should. Though if we must have a term, we should choose
rather 'elegy'. It is an heroic-elegiac poem; and in a sense all its first 3,136 lines are the prelude to
a dirge.[27]

A singular effect
Tolkien takes a moment to dismiss another criticism, that monsters should not have been made to appear in
both halves. He replies he can see the point of no monsters, but not in complaining about their mere numbers;
the poet could not, he argues, have balanced Beowulf's rise to fame through a war in Frisia, against death by
dragon. Similarly, he dismisses notions that the poem is primitive: it is instead a late poem, using materials left
over from a vanished age:

When new Beowulf was already antiquarian, in a good sense, and it now produces a singular
effect. For it is now to us itself ancient; and yet its maker was telling of things already old and
weighted with regret, and he expended his art in making keen that touch upon the heart which
sorrows have that are both poignant and remote. If the funeral of Beowulf moved once like the
echo of an ancient dirge, far-off and hopeless, it is to us as a memory brought over the hills, an
echo of an echo. There is not much poetry in the world like this;[28]
Tolkien finishes by arguing that Beowulf "has its own individual character, and peculiar solemnity;"[28] and
would still be powerful even if it came from some unknown time and place; but that in fact its language, Old
English,

has still essential kinship with our own, it was made in this land, and moves in our northern
world beneath our northern sky, and for those who are native to that tongue and land, it must
ever call with a profound appeal – until the dragon comes.[29]

Reception

Scholars
Scholars and critics agree on the work's wide influence. Tom Shippey wrote that the essay "was seized upon
eagerly, even gratefully, by generations of critics".[3] Alvin A. Lee wrote that "Tolkien's manifesto and
interpretation have had more influence on readers than any other single study, even though it has been
challenged on just about every one of its major points."[4] Seth Lerer wrote that the essay "may well be the
originary piece of modern Beowulf criticism. … The strategies … control the fundamental assumptions of Old
English scholarship for the next fifty years."[5] R.D. Fulk commented that "No one denies the historical
importance of this lecture. … opening the way to the formalist principles that played such a vital role in the
subsequent development of further Beowulf scholarship. … the methodology … remains a model for
emulation.".[6] Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson call it in their Beowulf, An Edition (1998) "the most
influential literary criticism of the poem ever written".[30] George Clark calls it "The most influential critical
essay on the poem", stating it without qualification or justification as a known fact.[31] Michael Lapidge
similarly names it "his widely influential critical discussion of the poem".[32]

The scholar and translator Roy Liuzza commented that Tolkien's essay "is usually credited with re-establishing
the fabulous elements and heroic combats at the center of the modern reader's appreciation of the poem."
Liuzza at once went on to write, however, that "the separation of the poem into 'mythical' and 'historical'
elements is a false dichotomy". He argues that if myth can condense and hold the deepest sources of tension
between self and the social order, and dramatises current ideologies by projecting them into the past, then
even the hero Beowulf's mythic fights are at the same time throwing light on society and history.[33]

The historian Patrick Wormald wrote of the essay: "it would be no exaggeration to describe [it] as one of the
most influential works of literary criticism of that century, and since which nothing in Beowulf studies has
been quite the same."[34] However, Wormald continues: "The arguments of Tolkien's paper were not
universally accepted, and some of its effects would perhaps have been disowned by the author, but its general
impact could be summarized by saying that most critics have learnt to take the Beowulf poet a great deal more
seriously".[34] Wormald added that

Tolkien argued powerfully that, for the Germanic mentality that gave birth to the myth of
Ragnarök, the monsters of the poem were the only appropriate enemies for a great hero, and
thus shifted Beowulf from the irrelevant fringes to the very centre of the Anglo-Saxon thought
 world. This naturally encouraged a pre-existent tendency to square the poem with what else was
known of the 'serious' levels of Anglo-Saxon thought - chiefly the Latin scholarship of the
Church. Secondly, Tolkien went far towards vindicating the structure of the poem by arguing
that it was a balance of contrasting and interlocking halves. His thesis not only convinced many
critics but inspired them to follow his example, with the result that Tolkien's own position has
been outflanked. Whereas previous generations of scholars, Tolkien included, had been quite
prepared to explain what they considered structural and stylistic blemishes as interpolations,
modern writers seek evidence of artistic refinement in some of the poem's least promising
features.[34]

Michael D. C. Drout similarly describes the essay's importance and arguments, writing that it

is the most important article ever written about Beowulf … Tolkien's shadow looms long over
Beowulf scholarship. Much of this influence is because of the enormous success of [the essay],
which is viewed as the beginning of modern Beowulf criticism. … Tolkien was so influential ...
because he developed a big-picture reading of the poem that has found favour with several
generations of critics. … [He] made the first widely accepted case for viewing Beowulf as
aesthetically successful, and he showed how the monsters in Beowulf were symbolic (not
allegorical) representations of chaos and night, set in opposition to stability and civilization. …
Thus, Tolkien interpreted the theme of Beowulf to be that "man, each man and all men and all
their works shall die," a theme consistent with the heathen past but one that "no Christian need
despise." It was this theme, Tolkien argued, that brought the great dignity to the poem that even
scholars who had regretted the monsters had noted.[1]

Drout then remarks on the paradoxical success of the essay:

The massive influence of "The Homecoming" and "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" is in
some ways ironic. The great majority of Tolkien's work on Beowulf was of the sort represented
by the textual commentry in Finn and Hengest—detailed, philological, historical, and infinitely
painstaking. Yet the most influential of Tolkien's discussions of the poem are those in which he
makes the greatest unsupported (or lightly supported) generalizations and in which he discusses
the poem in the broadest possible terms. Tolkien would perhaps have seen a fundamental
continuity between the detailed and philological and the broader and more interpret[at]ive work,
but because of the accidents of publication—and because of Tolkien's great gift for rhetoric—only
the latter has shaped the field of Beowulf criticism.[1]

John D. Niles observed that "Bypassing earlier scholarship, critics of the past fifty years have generally traced
the current era of Beowulf studies back to 1936",[2] meaning to Tolkien's essay, which he called "eloquent and
incisive".[2] Niles argued that the essay quickly came to be a starting point, as scholars from then on
assumed—with Tolkien—that the poem was "an aesthetic unity endowed with spiritual significance."[2] In
Niles's view, Tolkien thought that the battles with monsters and the sombre, elegiac tone of the poem
expressed the "artistic designs of a deep thinker, religiously enlightened, who let his mind play over a lost
heroic world of the imagination",[2] 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."[2] 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.[2]

Press
Joan Acocella, 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."[8] She adds that "Tolkien preferred the
monsters to the critics."[8]

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 in the symbolic value of such preternatural
representations of sheer evil."[35] Weinreich added that "Beowulf, like other ancient legends, served to nourish
Tolkien's imagination."[35]

John Garth, writing in The Guardian, describes the paper as "still well worth reading, not only as an
introduction to the poem, but also because it decisively changed the direction and emphasis of Beowulf
scholarship. Up to that point it had been used as a quarry of linguistic, historical and archaeological detail".[36]
Garth notes that

Tolkien pushed the monsters to the forefront. He argued that they represent the impermanence
of human life, the mortal enemy that can strike at the heart of everything we hold dear, the force
against which we need to muster all our strength – even if ultimately we may lose the fight.
Without the monsters, the peculiarly northern courage of Beowulf and his men is meaningless.
Tolkien, veteran of the Somme, knew that it was not.[36]

Translator
Tolkien's paper was praised by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney in the introduction to his critically acclaimed
translation of Beowulf. He wrote that the "epoch-making paper"[37] stood out in considering Beowulf as
literature. Heaney argued that Tolkien "took for granted the poem's integrity and distinction as a work of art",
[37]
and showed how the poem achieved that status:

Tolkien assumed that the poet had felt his way through the inherited material - the fabulous
elements and the traditional accounts of a heroic past - and by a combination of creative
intuition and conscious structuring had arrived at a unity of effect and a balanced order. He
assumed, in other words, that the Beowulf poet was an imaginative writer rather than some kind
of back-formation derived from nineteenth-century folklore and philology.[37]
The poet and Beowulf
translator Seamus Heaney
praised The Monsters and
the Critics.
Heaney called the paper's literary treatment "brilliant".[37] He suggested that it had changed the way that
Beowulf was valued, and that it had started "a new era of appreciation" of the poem.[37]

New light from Tolkien's Beowulf translation

Tolkien's own translation of Beowulf, published posthumously in 2014 as Beowulf: A Translation and
Commentary, has been linked to the essay.[8][36] Shippey has argued that the translation throws light on "what
Tolkien really thought in 1936". Tolkien stated, for instance, that Beowulf was not an actual picture of
Scandinavia around 500 AD, but was a self-consistent picture with the marks of design and thought. This
might leave the reader wondering, commented Shippey, what exactly Tolkien meant by that. Shippey argued
that there was evidence from the chronology given in the 2014 book, supported by the work of scholars such as
Martin Rundkvist, that there was serious trouble among the eastern Geats, with migration and the taking over
of mead-halls by new leaders, at that time, just as portrayed in the poem.[38][39]

Editions
◾ Tolkien, J. R. R. (1936). "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics". Proceedings of the British Academy. 22:
245–95.
◾ Tolkien, J. R. R. (1983). The Monsters and the Critics. London: George Allen & Unwin. ISBN 0-04-
809019-0.
◾ Tolkien, J. R. R. (1997). The Monsters and the Critics. London: HarperCollins. ISBN 0-261-10263-X.
◾ Nicholson, Lewis E., ed. (1963). An Anthology of Beowulf Criticism. Notre Dame: University of Notre
Dame Press. ISBN 0-268-00006-9.
◾ Fulk, Robert Dennis, ed. (1991). Interpretations of Beowulf: A Critical Anthology
(https://books.google.com/books?id=_sU0bTfcIjYC&pg=PA14). Indiana University Press. pp. 14–43.
ISBN 0-253-20639-1.

Translations
◾ Icelandic: Arndís Þórarinsdóttir, trans. (2013). Bjólfskviða: Forynjurnar og fræðimennirnir. Reykjavík: Hið
íslenzka bókmenntafélag. ISBN 9789979663096.

See also
◾ Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary (Tolkien's translation of the poem, with extensive commentary,
written before "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics", edited by Christopher Tolkien, 2014)
◾ On Translating Beowulf (Tolkien's essay of advice to any translator of the poem)

References
1. Drout, Michael D. C. (2007). Beowulf: Tolkien's Scholarship (https://books.google.com/books?
id=B0loOBA3ejIC&pg=PA60). J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment. Taylor
& Francis. pp. 59–60. ISBN 978-0-415-96942-0.
 2. Niles, John D. (1998). "Beowulf, Truth, and Meaning". In Bjork, Robert E.; Niles, John D. (eds.). A Beowulf
Handbook. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P. p. 5. ISBN 0-8032-6150-0. "Bypassing earlier scholarship,
critics of the past fifty years have generally traced the current era of Beowulf studies back to 1936 [and
Tolkien's essay]."
3. Shippey, Thomas A. (1998). "Structure and Unity". In Bjork, Robert E.; Niles, John D. (eds.). A Beowulf
Handbook. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. p. 163. ISBN 0-8032-6150-0. "[Tolkien's essay]
was seized upon eagerly, even gratefully, by generations of critics."
4. Le, Alvin A. (1998). "Symbolism and Allegory". In Bjork, Robert E.; Niles, John D. (eds.). A Beowulf
Handbook. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press. p. 240. ISBN 0-8032-6150-0. "Tolkien's
manifesto and interpretation have had more influence on readers than any other single study, even
thought it has been challenged on just about every one of its major points."
5. Lerer, Seth (1998). "Beowulf and Contemporary Critical Theory". In Bjork, Robert E.; Niles, John D. (eds.).
A Beowulf Handbook. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press. pp. 328, 330. ISBN 0-8032-
6150-0. "[Tolkien's essay] may well be the originary piece of modern Beowulf criticism. . . . The
strategies . . . control the fundamental assumptions of Old English scholarship for the next fifty years."
6. Fulk, R.D. (1991). "Preface". In Fulk, R.D. (ed.). Interpretations of Beowulf. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana
UP. pp. xi–xii. ISBN 0-253-32437-8. "No one denies the historical importance of this lecture. . . . opening
the way to the formalist principles that played such a vital role in the subsequent development of further
Beowulf scholarship. . . . the methodology . . . remains a model for emulation."
7. Solopova, Elizabeth (2009), Languages, Myths and History: An Introduction to the Linguistic and Literary
Background of J.R.R. Tolkien's Fiction, New York City: North Landing Books, p. 14, ISBN 0-9816607-1-1
8. Acocella, Joan (2 June 2014). "Slaying Monsters: Tolkien's Beowulf"
(http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/02/slaying-monsters). The New Yorker. Retrieved
23 November 2014. "In his view, the meaning of the poem had been ignored in favor of archeological and
philological study."
9. Magennis, Hugh (2011). Translating Beowulf: Modern Versions in English Verse
(https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=1BZss2TtTisC&pg=PA16&lpg=PA16). D.S.Brewer. pp. 6, 15–17.
ISBN 978-1843842613.
10. Sharp, Tom. "J. R. R. Tolkien, Beowulf and the Critics. Ed. Michael D. C. Drout (Review)"
(http://www.sfsu.edu/~medieval/Volume5/Beowulf.html). San Francisco State University. Retrieved
30 January 2015.
11. Tolkien 1997, p. 5.
12. Tolkien 1997, p. 6.
13. Tolkien 1997, p. 7.
14. Tolkien 1997, p. 8.
15. Tolkien 1997, pp. 10-11.
16. Tolkien 1997, pp. 13-14.
17. Tolkien 1997, p. 15.
18. Tolkien 1997, p. 17.
19. Tolkien 1997, pp. 19-20.
20. Tolkien 1997, p. 21.
21. Tolkien 1997, p. 23.
22. Tolkien 1997, p. 25.
23. Tolkien 1997, p. 26.
24. Tolkien 1997, p. 27.
25. Tolkien 1997, p. 28.
26. Tolkien 1997, p. 30.
27. Tolkien 1997, p. 31.
28. Tolkien 1997, p. 33.
29. Tolkien 1997, pp. 33-34.
30. Mitchell, Bruce; Robinson, Fred C. (1998). Beowulf: An Edition. Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978-0631172260.
31. Clark, George (1998). Bjork, Robert E.; Niles, John D. (eds.). The Hero and the Theme
(https://books.google.com/books?id=SaFdpGdjvtoC&pg=PA279). A Beowulf Handbook. University of
Nebraska Press. p. 279. ISBN 0-8032-6150-0.
32. Michael Lapidge (January 1996). Anglo-Latin Literature, 600-899 (https://books.google.com/books?
id=UTWO1z2nO1wC&pg=PA273). A&C Black. p. 273. ISBN 978-1-85285-011-1.
33. Liuzza, Roy (2013). Beowulf: Facing page translation (2nd ed.). Ontario, Canada: Broadview. p. 17.
ISBN 978-1-55481-113-7.
34. Wormald, Patrick (15 April 2008). Times of Bede: Studies in Early English Christian Society and its
Historian (https://books.google.com/books?id=KiS5C5PTVvkC&pg=PA35). John Wiley & Sons. p. 35.
ISBN 978-0-470-69265-3.
35. Weinreich, Regina (17 June 1984). "In Short: THE MONSTERS AND THE CRITICS: And Other Essays.
By J. R. R. Tolkien" (https://www.nytimes.com/1984/06/17/books/in-short-243684.html?pagewanted=4).
The New York Times. Retrieved 30 January 2015.
36. Garth, John (22 March 2014). "JRR Tolkien's translation of Beowulf: bring on the monsters"
(https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/22/jrr-tolkien-translation-beowulf-monsters). The Guardian.
Retrieved 23 November 2014.
37. Heaney, Seamus (2000) [1999]. Beowulf. Faber and Faber. p. xi. ISBN 0-571-20376-0.
38. Shippey, Tom. "JRR Tolkien's Beowulf with Dr. Tom Shippey - Lecture 3"
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl8-pYYLNFQ). Signum University. Retrieved 4 September 2017.
39. Rundkvist, Martin. "Mead-Halls of the Eastern Geats"
(https://web.archive.org/web/20150316213745/http://scienceblogs.com/aardvarchaeology/wp-
content/blogs.dir/417/files/2012/04/i-622119bd51bd29c8f4006bdff70524df-Rundkvist%202011%20Mead-
halls.pdf) (PDF). Archived from the original (http://scienceblogs.com/aardvarchaeology/wp-
content/blogs.dir/417/files/2012/04/i-622119bd51bd29c8f4006bdff70524df-Rundkvist%202011%20Mead-
halls.pdf) (PDF) on 16 March 2015. Retrieved 4 September 2017.

Sources
◾ Tolkien, Christopher (1997). The Monsters and the Critics. HarperCollins. ISBN 0-261-10263-X.

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