The Monsters and The Critics

The Monsters and the Critics is a collection of J. R. R. Tolkien's scholarly linguistic essays edited by his son Christopher and published posthumously in 1983.

The essays are:

• "Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics" looks at Beowulf.
• "On Translating Beowulf" looks at translating Anglo-Saxon.
• "On Fairy-Stories," the 1939 Andrew Lang lecture at St Andew's University, is a defence of the fantasy genre.
• "A Secret Vice" talks about creating imaginary languages, giving background to Tolkien's Quenya and Sindarin.
• "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" is a study of the medieval poem of the same name.
• "English and Welsh," the inaugural O'Donnell Memorial Lecture (1955), is a survey of the historical relationship between the two tongues, including an analysis of the word Welsh.
• "Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford", given upon his retirement in 1959.