From a panoramic view from the tower, ‘Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics’ turns to a demonstration of fusion in the imagination of monsters at the center of the poem. Comparison with the Ragnarök told in the later Icelandic Völuspá suggested to Tolkien that the Anglo-Saxon poet had reconciled the vanished heathen mythology with the teachings of the Church. For at the center of the poem are monsters that are enemies of both the (now vanished) immortal gods and the Eternal God. Beowulf fights the monsters alone; once mortal heroes were allied with mortal gods in a war of doom against the monsters; all who fight the monsters do the Lord’s work.