Monsters and evil in Tolkien Smaug the Golden, Sauron the Terrible, the Balrog of Moria... These are some of J. R. R. Tolkien's most remarkable antagonists, and few of us would disagree that, without them, his novels would not be the same. But what is the secret of their success as monstrous antagonists? Discover the answer in this twenty-minute podcast.

Rafael J. Pascual is a Postdoctoral Research Assistant at CLASP: A Consolidated Library of Anglo-Saxon Poetry, an EU-funded project based at the Oxford Faculty of English Language and Literature. He is also a Junior Research Fellow at New College and a Lecturer in Early Medieval English Literature at Magdalen College, Oxford. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Granada (2014), with a dissertation on the dating and textual criticism of 'Beowulf', on the strength of which he gained a two-year Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard University.