Dragons have always been popular subjects of fantasy media, particularly so in the past decade thanks to a resurgence that can likely be linked to Game of Thrones. Yet while many modern shows have taken a similar approach to their draconic stars, distilling dragons into something akin to flying, reptilian, and possibly magical horses, that’s far from a universal depiction. There’s no better contrasting example than how J. R. R. Tolkien portrays dragons in The Lord of the Rings and other parts of his Legendarium.
Tolkien drew heavily from Scandinavian, Saxon, and Germanic myths and legends to create dragons that would never deign to be ridden by any mere mortal. The Silmarillion and Tolkien’s other works detail a whole hierarchy of serpents and wyrms and other dragon-kin; he only named four proper dragons, but they were some of the largest, fiercest, and most dangerous creatures he ever described.
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Smaug The Golden
Scourge Of Erebor, Chiefest And Greatest Of Calamities
The first and most famous of Tolkien’s dragons, Smaug the Tremendous appears in The Hobbit. Tolkien based much of Smaug on the mythological Norse dragon Fáfnir, one of the villains of the Völsunga saga that inspired the famous opera Der Ring des Nibelungen. As a result, Smaug is incredibly vain, but his vanity is equaled by his power, as the Dwarven denizens of Erebor learned when he drove them from their home and claimed the Lonely Mountain for himself.
For all his ferocity, though, Smaug is the weakest dragon that Tolkien detailed by name; by the end of Middle-earth’s Third Age, few of the great dragons remained. Smaug is noted by Gandalf as being young when he took over Erebor, so it’s likely he hadn’t grown to the height of his power by the time his one weakness – an unarmored patch of scales on his chest – was lethally exploited by Bard of Lake-town.
3
Scatha The Worm
Blind Long-Worm Of The Grey Mountains’ Depths
As a Long-worm, Scatha didn’t have the wings of a more traditionally-shaped dragon; rather, like the Norse linnormr, he was a staggeringly long, scaled serpent, generally portrayed with clawed forelimbs. Tolkien wrote a poem describing Scatha that was eventually published in 2024’s The Collected Poems of J. R. R. Tolkien, where he described Scatha’s ferocity, his blindness, and perhaps most notably, his lack of traditional dragonfire. Instead, Scatha was a cold-drake, a breed of dragon created by Morgoth in the late First Age that could breathe out clouds of frigid air that burned flesh and terrified men.
Linnormr – usually Anglicized as “lindworms” – are serpentine monsters in Northern, Central, and Western European folklore, generally depicted as being either limbless or only having a pair of forelimbs. They are not to be confused with the Tatzelwurm, their Southern European equivalent, which stems from folklore in the Alps and is physically similar except for having the face of a cat.
Scatha plagued the Grey Mountains for centuries but was finally slain in a mighty fight with Fram, the Lord of the Éothéod (the Northmen who lived between the Vales of Anduin and the forest of Mirkwood in the middle of the Third Age), who went on to found the kingdom of Rohan at the grace of the men of Gondor. In fact, the Horn of the Mark, the silver war horn of Dwarven make that Lady Éowyn of the Shield-Arm gifts to Merry Brandybuck, was originally part of Scatha’s horde.
2
Glaurung, The Father Of Dragons
Dragon-king Of Nargothrond
Glaurung was the very first dragon to crawl out of the depths of Arda and see the face of Middle-earth; he emerged from the depths of his master Morgoth’s fortress of Angband in F. A. 260, as the Noldor elves besieged it in hopes of containing the fallen Ainur’s evil. Glaurung was a horrible surprise for the amᴀssed elven armies, who hadn’t expected such a mᴀssive and powerful beast, and he pushed their lines back a ways before Fingon the Valiant and a company of archers forced him back.
Morgoth forced Glaurung to slumber for two centuries following that defeat, as he was displeased the dragon had emerged before he’d finished growing. In F. A. 455, Glaurung burst forth again in the prime of his power and for the next two decades slaughtered foes before him. A grievous wound from the Dwarf-lord Azaghâl forced his retreat for a time, but eventually, Glaurung sacked the Noldor fortress of Nargothrond and ruled there for a time, until he was slain by the great hero Túrin in F. A. 498.
1
Ancalagon The Black
Mightiest Of Morgoth’s Dragon-host
Glaurung may have been the first of Morgoth’s dragons, but Ancalagon was the strongest. This mᴀssive monstrosity was the greatest fire-breathing dragon to have ever lived and led Morgoth’s dragons during the War of Wrath that began in F. A. 545, as the Valar finally lent their strength to the efforts of the Host of the West in hopes of dethroning the Dark Lord. Ancalagon and his horde were a nearly unstoppable force on the battlefield, and it seemed that none could stand against them.
In T. A. 3018, Gandalf the Grey remarked to Frodo Baggins that the One Ring was truly indestructible and that even the dragon-fire of Ancalagon the Black would have had no effect on it.
Yet even Morgoth’s mightiest servant could only stand so long against all the forces of the West, and so Eärendil the Mariner, father of Elrond Half-Elven, swept down from the clouds in his sky-ship Vingilótë alongside the King of Eagles and a mighty flock of birds, and after a day’s pitched battle, Eärendil struck Ancalagon a mortal blow. The great black dragon fell from the sky, shattering the peaks of the mountains of Thangorodrim and destroying Morgoth’s fortress of Angband which lay below them, thus ending the most powerful dragon in The Lord of the Rings.
The Lord of the Rings
- Movie(s)
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The Lord of the Rings (1978), The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim
- Created by
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J.R.R. Tolkien
- First Film
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The Lord of the Rings (1978)
- Cast
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Norman Bird, Anthony Daniels, Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Liv Tyler, Viggo Mortensen, Sean Astin, Cate Blanchett, John Rhys-Davies, Billy Boyd, Dominic Monaghan, Orlando Bloom, Christopher Lee, Hugo Weaving, Sean Bean, Ian Holm, Andy Serkis, Brad Dourif, Karl Urban, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, James Nesbitt, Ken Stott, Benedict Cumberbatch, Evangeline Lilly, Lee Pace, Luke Evans, Morfydd Clark, Mike Wood, Ismael Cruz Cordova, Charlie Vickers, Markella Kavenagh, Megan Richards, Sara Zwangobani, Daniel Weyman, Cynthia Addai-Robinson, Lenny Henry, Brian Cox, Shaun Dooley, Miranda Otto, Bilal Hasna, Benjamin Wainwright, Luke Pasqualino, Christopher Guard, William Squire, Michael Scholes, John Hurt
- TV Show(s)
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The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power
