In order to improve the fault monitoring performance of grounding electrode lines in ultra-high voltage DC (UHVDC) transmission systems, a novel fault monitoring approach based on the high-frequency voltage standing-wave ratio (VSWR) is proposed in this paper. The VSWR is defined considering a lossless transmission line, and the characteristics of the VSWR under different conditions are analyzed. It is shown that the VSWR equals 1 when the terminal resistance completely matches the characteristic impedance of the line, and when a short circuit fault occurs on the grounding electrode line, the VSWR will be greater than 1. The VSWR will approach positive infinity under metallic earth fault conditions, whereas the VSWR in non-metallic earth faults will be smaller. Based on these analytical results, a fault supervision criterion is formulated. The effectiveness of the proposed VSWR-based fault supervision technique is verified with a typical UHVDC project established in Power Systems Computer Aided Design/Electromagnetic Transients including DC(PSCAD/EMTDC). Simulation results indicate that the proposed strategy can reliably identify the grounding electrode line fault and has strong anti-fault resistance capability.