and a landmark in scholarly criticism of Beowulf.  One of the many important things which he did was to demand that the monsters be taken seriously -- not as monsters per se, but as physical manifestations of other things about which the poet had things to say.  This picks up on what Curious has said a few times in other places, that Tolkien's monsters often seem to beg for psychological explanations of their presence and character.  One of the things which, as I recall, Tolkien didn't say about the monsters in Beowulf (or at least didn't emphasise as much as he might have) was that the poet explicitly defines the monsters, on various occasions, as offspring of Cain and as enemies of God.  It is a way of rehabilitating the pagan hero Beowulf in the eyes of the poet's (equally) Christian contemporaries, many of whom did not approve of stories about the pagan past.  By defining the monsters as God's enemies -- and by quietly letting Beowulf exemplify Christian virtues --, the poet lets his hero do God's work in a pagan time.

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.