This article contains spoilers forThe Lord of the RingsandThe Silmarillion.High fantasy originator J.R.R. Tolkien pennedThe Hobbit, which inspired fantasy dragons for generations to come, but Tolkien also wrote about dragons in a few other stories set inThe Lord of the Ringsworld. Published in 1937,The Hobbit’sfamous dragon was actually a starkly original invention at the time, despite dragons being a mainstay of the fantasy genre these days. Intelligent and with their own distinct personalities, Tolkien’s dragons were an evolution of the aggressive beasts of Norse myth.Peter Jackson’sHobbittrilogydid a great job bringing this concept to life.
Tolkien’s 1927 poem about Oliphaunts wasn’t overtly set in Middle-earth, but it later formed the basis of a poem mentioned inLord of the Rings. Aside from that debatable entry into the legendarium,The Hobbitwas the first publication ofThe Lord of the Rings’sworld. The main villain of this work was a dragon, proving dragons' centrality to the lore ofTolkien’s Middle-earth. But Tolkien had been drafting tales of Middle-earth and its dragons since 1914, and only after he passed away did his son publish this wider lore in the form ofThe SilmarillionandThe History of Middle-earth.
4Scatha
The Long-Worm
Éowyn was one ofthe best characters inThe Lord of the Ringsand inThe Return of the King, she gave Merry a horn that “came from the hoard of Scatha the Worm.” Éowyn commented that “Eorl the Young brought it from the north.” She referred to an old Rohirrim king, alive between 2485 and 2545.In Eorl’s time, the Rohirrim lived further norththan the plains of Rohan of the late Third Age. This situated them near the Ered Mithrin, known as the Grey Mountains, a mountain range at the top of Rhovanion. This was Scatha’s territory.
Scatha was one of the"long-worms"according to “Appendix A,” but it’s uncertain if these differed from the other"worms"(dragons).
Watchers ofThe Rings of Powermay recognize Rhovanion as the territory of the Harfoots in Tolkien’s Second Age. Tolkien backed up the show’s location of the Harfoots in his prologue toThe Lord of the Rings, and he also placed Scatha in that general vicinity, calling him “the great dragon of Ered Mithrin.“Scatha’s tale was more fully laid out in “Appendix A"ofThe Lord of the RingsbutPeter Jackson’sLord of the RingsandHobbitmoviesnever went into its detail. Ancient Rohirrim Fram slew Scatha, starting a feud with Dwarves over his hoard.
3Glaurung
The First
Glaurung was the main villain of “Of Túrin Turambar,” the twenty-first chapter ofThe Silmarillion. As such, he featured heavily inThe Children of Húrin, which was an alternative version of Tolkien’s Turambar story. Tolkien’s son, Christopher, went back to the Turambar story after he publishedThe Silmarillionand created this longer edit of his father’s work. The resulting publication was a novel outlining the downfall of the heroic Húrin and Glaurung’s slow and painful decimation of his children.
Before time
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In 1914, Tolkien worked on a story about Kullervo, a doomed character in a Finnish epic published in 1835. He would later turn this into his story of Túrin Turambar. Tolkien wrote the first ever drafts concerning Middle-earth in 1914, also touching on Eärendil. That makes Glaurung’s story part of Tolkien’s first-ever imaginings ofLord of the Ringsand its mythology.Glaurung put a spell on Túrin’s sister, Nienor, to make her forget her past. Túrin didn’t know her in her adulthood, so he fell in love with Nienor when they met. Needless to say, this ended in tragedy.
The Dwarves' Ancient Lord Of The Rings Creation Would Have Completely Changed The Hobbit’s Outcome
One ancient Dwarf creation from a Tolkien story could have turned the events of the Hobbit around, making for a totally different story.
Glaurung also saw to the ruin of Nargothrond, which was the realm of theElf Finrod Felagund. Finrod was Galadriel’s brother, and this lesser-known Tolkien character had established one of the greatest realms of the First Age before Glaurung invaded it and took over.Glaurung was the first dragon that Morgoth created, andhe took a long time to mature. As such, he was known as the Father of Dragons and may go down in Eldar lore as the worst and the most devastating of them.
2Ancalagon
The Greatest
Ancalagon the Black was known as the greatest of Morgoth’s dragons, and was winged, unlike Glaurung. While the flightless Glaurung represented Morgoth’s first, tentative experiments in dragonkind,Ancalagon was Glaurung’s lethal evolution. Both Glaurung and Ancalagon were confirmed in Tolkien’s stories as fire-drakes. Fire-drakes were fire-breathing dragons known inthe Elvish language of Quenyaas Urulóki. Ancalagon fought on Morgoth’s side in the War of Wrath, one of the great Wars of Beleriand.
Both fire-drakes and cold-drakes existed in Middle-earth, with an unnamed cold-drake slaying the Dwarves Dáin I and Frór.
The War of Wrath was so cataclysmic that it sunk most ofthe realm of Beleriand, ending the First Age and beginning the Second. Ancalagon and the unnamed dragons fighting with him had a big hand in this extensive destruction.This Great Worm was slain by Elrond’s father, Eärendil the Mariner. Aided by the Great Eagles, Eärendil “slew Ancalagon… and cast him from the sky; and he fell upon the towers of Thangorodrim, and they were broken in his ruin.” This First Age fire-drake has never been adapted for the screen, and neither has Glaurung, unlike Tolkien’s most famous dragon.
1Smaug
The Golden
Smaug the Golden is, of course, the antagonist ofThe Hobbit, finding central importance in the second movie in Jackson’sHobbittrilogy.Bilbo and the Company of Thorin took on SmauginThe Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, but it was Bard of Lake-town who finally killed the beast. Smaug’s arrogance and intellect made him a whole new kind of dragon in the literary landscape of 1937, whenThe Hobbitwas first published. Smaug exemplified a feature common to dragons in Middle-earth - the guarding and hoarding of wealth.
InThe Lost Road and Other Writings,Tolkien wrote an essay on etymology that listed Gostir as a dragon name meaning dread glance, but no detail on any dragon of this name was given.
Flawlessly voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch inThe Hobbitmovies,Smaug was living amid a giant stash of treasurethat he had claimed as his own. Dislodging Thorin’s ancestors from their home in Erebor, Smaug took his place as the owner of the hoard, killing anyone who stood in his path. InThe Lord of the Rings, Gandalf flagged to Frodo that “there is not now any dragon left on earth in which the old fire is hot enough [to melt the Rings of Power].” This implied that Smaug may be the best known dragon in Middle-earth, but he was not the last.
The Lord of the Rings
The Lord of the Rings is a multimedia franchise consisting of several movies and a TV show released by Amazon titled The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. The franchise is based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s book series that began in 1954 with The Fellowship of the Ring. The Lord of the Rings saw mainstream popularity with Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies.
