An extraordinary collection of Tolkien essays from the 1930s to 1950s. Make no mistake, these addresses were serious presentations to serious, and qualified audiences; which the casual reader is not.

His essays on Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight changed my perception of those works. His essay on translating Beowulf adds to my appreciation of the challenges of both translators and readers of translated texts. His On Fairy tales I have lauded elsewhere, was it appears also in The Tolkien Reader. The essays on English and Welsh and A Secret Vice were enjoyable and informative, though the latter and the closing Valedictory Address strike me as filler.

A very good, if difficult read.

Hwæt. It is sadly now too late for me to pursue my passion for linguistics/history, which is why I am grateful for this book allowing me to live that calling vicariously through my favorite author. According to the people around me this collection is not as interesting (or as funny) as I think it is, but I'm choosing to live my truth. This book is great and Beowulf is the superior field of study. þæt wæs þam gomelan gingæste word breostgehygdum.

This inclusion of "On Fairy-Stories" alone makes this collection worth having. That essay, with its unfortunate and uninspiring title, changed my life. I had always felt vaguely guilty that I was so drawn to fantasy literature, feeling almost that I was "cheating on reality", that I should be more in love with the real world than any fictional one. "On Fairy-Stories" helped cure me of that guilt, and see that the best myths can reveal the truth about the nature of the universe we live in better than any "realistic book" can. This is even more true when one is a Christian. I know Christians who feel a book is nonsense and unprofitable if it has "unrealistic" elements, occurrences that they would not believe possible to happen in actual life. I'm not sure how they square that sentiment with a reverence of the Christian Bible, which of course contains giants and giant-killers, references to fantastic beasts, a Dragon, talking animals, miracles, ghosts, sorcery, visions of another world hidden from everyday view, and resurrection of the dead. As Tolkien points out, the story of humanity is the story of the supernatural piercing and penetrating the merely natural world and infusing it with meaning; the most shocking and significant event in the history of the universe, the descent of the eternal One, the Creator-Of-Everything down into creation as a lowly fleshly creature, was the most supernatural event of all. What can one call the Bible if not a Fairy-Tale? It has been dismissed as such by atheists and skeptics for centuries, but they're right - only the point is not that fairy-tales as such are false, stories of "things that can't and have never happened", but that fairy-tales are infinitely more true than stories in which the natural world is the only world, and "reality" is limited to the sort of everyday occurrences that we generally observe, that our lives mostly consist of.

I shouldn't wholly neglect to mention "The Monsters and the Critics", an essay that is essential reading if you've ever read Beowulf, heard it lectured upon or spoken of in academic circles, or had contact with it any form.

This essay compilation, edited by Tolkien's son Christopher Tolkien, was challenging, inspiring, and profoundly moving. I still remember the night I purchased my copy of this from Blackwell's bookshop in Oxford, England. My favorite essay (they are all good in their own right) is Tolkien's essay on fairy stories he gave as a lecture at St. Andrew' in Scotland in 1939. It is a powerful philosophical work that explores the phenomenon of human consciousness, myth, storytelling, and religion. J.R.R.Tolkien gave the world some amazing works of literature such as The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. This book brings back some good memories of reading from it at The Eagle and Child pub in Oxford, England where Tolkien, Lewis, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, Hugo Dyson, Warnie Lewis, and the other Inklings would get together to talk nonsense, literature, theology, and life experience over beer, tea, cider, and pipes.

The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays is a collection of J.R.R. Tolkien’s academic writings, introduced by Christopher Tolkien. Each essay here stands on its own, and the main unifying thread is simply that they are all Tolkien's reflections on language, literature, and mythology.

Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics
In this essay, Tolkien uses a memorable metaphor to criticize academics who try to dissect Beowulf: he likens their approach to cutting open a ball to understand why it bounces. Ironically, Tolkien goes on to take Beowulf apart in his own way, focusing on its literary, rather than technical, structure. He describes Beowulf as a “heroic elegy,” interpreting it as a reflection on mortality and tragedy, summarized in the line, “He is a man, and that for him and many is sufficient tragedy.” While his approach is creative, it feels like a stretch. His defense of the dragon as an essential element of myth doesn’t quite land either. On this point, Tolkien’s ideas feel somewhat isolated from the text itself. He does get one thing right, though: reading Beowulf feels more like bricklaying than music—challenging and dense.

On Translating Beowulf
This essay is more practical, as Tolkien shares insights from his translation work. Some of his translation choices—rendering “warriors” as “knights” and “chieftains” as “princes”—don’t sit well with me, as they seem to romanticize figures from early medieval Denmark and Geatland. These warriors weren’t knights in the chivalric sense, and viewing them as such feels like a distortion of their historical reality.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
I chose to skip this essay, as I have yet to read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

On Fairy Stories
I won’t go into detail here, as I cover this essay in a separate review.

English and Welsh
This essay provides a glimpse into the past, with Tolkien tracing the historical links between English and Welsh, often through place names, though also through surnames. The second half of the essay dives into highly specialized topics, making it harder to follow for non-linguists, but overall it offers an intriguing look at the cultural interplay of these languages.

A Secret Vice
In this extended lecture, Tolkien discusses constructed languages, framing them as a natural part of human creativity. He provides several examples from his own experience, including his languages Quenya and Sindarin. While I appreciate Tolkien’s work with language creation, this essay didn’t reveal anything particularly new or essential to me.

Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford
Tolkien begins this address by candidly acknowledging that university research is often done more out of financial necessity than passion. He critiques the curriculum’s heavy focus on the 19th century, and poetically suggests that Anglo-Saxon England represents not the root, but the flowering of English literary history. Tolkien’s reflections on the tension between language and literature come off as a bit distant for those outside Oxford, and the address feels less like a farewell and more like a lecture on academic priorities.

Conclusion
While The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays gives insight into Tolkien’s academic perspective, the collection feels disjointed and, at times, overly dense. For me, it wasn’t the most satisfying reading experience, as some parts are overly academic or speculative, and it lacks the coherence needed to fully engage a reader outside of Tolkien studies.

The title essay, basically arguing against the idea that the presence of monsters is a flaw in the seriousness of "Beowulf," is well-worth reading, and gives support to genre fans everywhere! The follow-up essay "On Translating Beowulf," which is strangely unconnected from Tolkien's own translation, which I haven't read yet, is interesting, but states firmly that the one thing one should never do in a translation is give it modern, "snappy" language: the very thing that Maria Dahvana Headley does in her excellent new translation. That gave me a real LOL.

All the essays are on elements of language and literature, and a few them get a little technical, or contain untranslated snippets of Old English, which I'm not ashamed to admit I skimmed over. But I enjoyed that sense of entering into the scholarship of an earlier age, and really liked the concluding speech, about the changes he saw in the university, and its approaches to the study of English, during his career. His description of the departments turning into "hydroponics," growing without roots, separated from their natural environment in the world, was a pretty good metaphor that I might steal!

For some reason, even though this book has been floating around on my periphery forever, I had a hard time tracking down a physical copy selling new and "in print." Hopefully there's just a new edition in the offing, and it isn't going to become actually scarce from the publisher. I did find it available for e-book. FYI.

The title essay (still going for best title of a critical essay) together with 'On Translating Beowulf' capture that poem, at least if you are a romantic like me. Gloriously written and elegiac in mood, these may rob your heart, and perhaps you can cheat, read them instead of Beowulf and yet understand.

A fascinating, if dense and academic look at several topics related to the relationship between language and literature. Of particular interest to me was 'On Fairy Stories', which is a passionate defense of fantasy and fairy stories. There are so many 'serious literary writers' who are dismissive of genre fiction, as though literary fiction has a corner on describing the human condition. As an Oxford don, Tolkien was uniquely situated to defend fairy stories clearly and with examples of fairy stories and their impact on people and literature across the centuries.

This book is the best insight into Tolkien’s professorial capacity. Not only was he a great author, but also a very influential scholar. His most famous essay, The Monsters and the Critics changed completely the way of approaching Beowulf as a work of art, and not only an archeological finding that may shed some light on the historical mysteries.
All in all, it was a great read. I recommend it to anyone who is at least a tiny bit interested in early-medieval literature or fantasy.

The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays is a curious beast, a collection assembled on account of the shared author, rather than necessarily shared themes. There are shared themes, revealing the prevailing interests of the author, but the essays are mostly rather different.

A key difficulty in the collection is that the lectures were delivered to academic audiences, who might have been presumed to be familiar with the on-going debates and the state of the subject at the time of delivery. As that time span covers a period from roughly a century ago to about seventy years ago, even the most up-to-date of these is long outdated. While I am no philologist, my familiarity with the study of the change in language (and, as an archaeologist, my own understanding of how change happens) makes me recognise elements that are no longer relevant to the study of language. Thus, those essays largely concerned with language - "On Translating Beowulf", "English and Welsh", "A Secret Vice" - are of interest largely to show how Tolkien thought about such things, although i found them often too technical to follow.

The essays concerned with literature, however, still maintain much that is of value. "The Monsters and the Critics" convinced me to reread Beowulf, a poem I don't like, on the enthusiasm with which Tolkien clearly adores it. "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" enhanced my enjoyment of that poem, which I do like, and helped me to see further value in the characterisation and behaviour of Sir Gawain. "On Fairy Stories" contains much that is valuable on the writing of fantasy literature, and is, I would argue, essential reading to anyone hoping to follow in Tolkien's footsteps. From these essays, as well as those on language, we see how Tolkien's key interest in English was in beauty - not in understanding a metaphor, allegory, or symbols; but in the rhythm of the poetry, the sound of the words, how the emotions were stirred. Even where I do not agree with him, I appreciated what he had to say. (I principally read this collection because of Ursula K. Le Guin's references to "On Fairy Stories", which I felt deserved more elaboration from the author himself. While I ultimately find I like Le Guin's point-of-view more, these essays do enhance my respect for Tolkien.)

The Valedictory address is a strange thing to read. Many of the themes of the previous essays are elaborated upon, but the surface-level concern is with the organisation on the English degree at the University of Oxford seventy years ago. Unfortunately, I did not pay enough attention to the structure of the English course while I was studying Classics and archaeology, so I do not know if and how things have changed. Certainly this essay is of biographical interest, too. But it is a bizarre feature of an essay collection that will be primarily consumed by fans of The Lord of the Rings who want to go a bit deeper.

While "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" is also included in Tolkien's translation of that poem, the other essays I enjoyed are not available elsewhere, as far as I know, and therefore I would say that this collection is valueable, if a little weird.

3.5. Of the works in this volume, the title essay is a trenchant and important piece of literary criticism, and "On Fairy-Stories" is quite intriguing, at the very least for its bold closing contention that the Passion is the ultimate expression of the fairy-story as Tolkien defines it. "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" has some interesting ideas, but Tolkien seems to address the poem on only a few fronts while having the air of one who has thought of everything. The other essays are fairly rambling and I expect they will only be of particular interest to their specific disciplines.

Especialmente interesante el ensayo sobre los cuentos de hadas. Aunque discrepo en algunos de los planteamientos, sirve para entender la concepción de lo fantástico en Tolkien.

Los textos sobre Beowulf, en los que defiende su valor como obra literaria más allá de servir como fuente histórica o antropológica, son también muy interesantes.