‘Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics’ is an academic performance designed around the image of the Tower that offers a view on the Straight Road of Beowulf. The allegory of the tower is a tale of failed time-travel wherein none of the modern critics ascend the stair and look upon the view as it once appeared to an Anglo-Saxon audience. Comparison of allegory and novel of time-travel suggest that the latter was abandoned when Tolkien saw that the sky of the Interwar ‘Silmarillion’ was incompatible with the skies of the twentieth century. Abandonment of the time-travel project marks the birth of the idea of The Lord of the Rings and a transformation of the ‘Silmarillion’ that J.R.R. Tolkien never finished.