The Monsters and the Critics

For the news website, see Monsters and Critics.

The Monsters and the Critics
Dustwrapper of first edition
Author(s)	J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Christopher Tolkien
Country	United Kingdom, United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Literature, Essays
Publisher	George Allen & Unwin, Houghton Mifflin
Publication date	1983
ISBN	0-0480-9019-0
OCLC Number	9945117
Dewey Decimal	820/.9 19
LC Classification	PE27 .T65 1983

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.

External links

• The Monsters and the Critics publication history at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database