Smaug the Dragon
In the amazing world of Tolkien, Smaug is a “great” fire drake of the Third Age, considered to be the last “great” dragon to exist in Middle Earth. Drawn to the enormous wealth amassed by the Dwarves of the Lonely Mountain during the reign of King Thrór, he laid waste to the neighboring city of Dale and captured the Lonely Mountain, driving the surviving Dwarves into exile. Even though his origin is unknown, some believe he was one of the very few survivors of the War of Wrath.
The dragon Smaug—who debuted in The Hobbit in 1937, was inspired by J.R.R. Tolkiens early reading of mythology. Published on this day in 1937, The Hobbit has delighted and terrified generations of children. But where did the idea for Smaug come from? Like his whole world of Middle-earth, J. R. R. Tolkien drew deeply on real mythology to create the dragon. In fact, some of the roots of Middle-earth lay with his childhood love of dragons, so it makes some sense that a book Tolkien wrote for children would center on a dragon.
Smaug was not created whole-cloth, of course: He shares a number of qualities with dragons from Norse mythology and medieval literature.
The most important of of Smaug’s antecedents was Fafnir, a treasure-hoarding dragon from a Norse epic. Tolkien first ran into Fafnir in a story-book when he was very young, writes literature scholar Jonathan Evans, and the dragon had a profound effect. “I desired dragons with a profound desire,” Tolkien later said. “Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighborhood. But the world that contained even the imagination of Fafnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever cost of peril.”
Smaug was a fire-drake of the Third Age, considered to be the last “great” dragon to exist in Middle-earth. He was drawn towards the enormous wealth amassed by the Dwarves of the Lonely Mountain during the reign of King Thrór. In this endeavor he lay waste to the nearby city of Dale and captured the Lonely Mountain, driving the surviving Dwarves into exile.
For 171 years, Smaug hoarded the Lonely Mountain’s treasures to himself, staying within the mountain, until a company of Dwarves managed to enter the Lonely Mountain and awaken him from hibernation. Correctly believing that the Dwarves had received assistance from the men of Lake-town in entering the Lonely Mountain, Smaug left the mountain to wreak destruction upon Lake-town, nearly destroying it before being slain by Bard the Bowman.
Previous Post
Next Post
