All 4 named dragons in the Lord of the Rings mythology

This article contains spoilers for The Lord of the Rings And The Silmarillion.JR Tolkien, the originator of high fantasy The HobbitThat inspired fantasy dragons for generations to come, but Tolkien also wrote about dragons in several other stories. The Lord of the Rings World. published in 1937, The Hobbit Famous Dragon is actually a starkly original invention at the time, despite dragons being a mainstay of the fantasy genre these days. Tolkien’s dragons, intelligent and with their own personalities, were an evolution of the aggressive beasts of Norse myth. Peter Jackson Hobbit Trilogy did a great job of bringing this concept to life.

Tolkien’s 1927 poem about Olyphaunts is not overtly set in Middle-earth, but it later formed the basis of a poem mentioned in Lord of the Rings. Apart from this debatable entry in the legend, The Hobbit was the first edition of The Lord of the Rings World. The main villain of this work was a dragon, proving dragons’ centrality to the lore of Tolkien’s Middle-earth. But Tolkien had been writing stories about Middle-earth and its dragons since 1914, and it wasn’t until after he died that his son published the larger study in the form of The Silmarillion And The history of Middle-earth.

4

Scotta

The Long-Worm

Éowyn was one of the best characters in The Lord of the Rings and in The return of the kingShe gave Mary a horn that “came from the fabric of Scota the worm.“Eowyn said that”Earl the Young brought it from the north.“She referred to an old Rohirrim king, living between 2485 and 2545. In Earl’s time, the Rohirim lived further north Like the Plains of Rohan of the late Third Age. This is situated near the Ered Mitrin, known as the Gray Mountains, a mountain range at the top of Rhovanion. This was Scott’s territory.

Watchers of The rings of power may 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 to The Lord of the RingsAnd he also placed Scotta in the general area, calling him “The great dragon of Ered Mitrin.” Scotta’s story was more fully laid out in “Appendix A.” of The Lord of the Rings But Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings And Hobbit Kino never went into its detail. Ancient Rohirrim Fram killed Scatha, starting a feud with dwarves over his hoard.

3

Glaurung

The first

Glaurung was the main villain of “of Túrin Turambar“, the twenty-first chapter of The Silmarillion. As such, he featured heavily in The children of HurinWhich was an alternate version of Tolkien’s Turambar story. Tolkien’s son, Christopher, returned to the Turambar story after he appeared The Silmarillion and created the larger edition of his father’s work. The resulting publication was a novel outlining the fall of the heroic Húrin and Glaurung’s slow and painful decimation of his children.

In 1914, Tolkien was working on a story about Kullervo, a betrothed character in a Finnish epic published in 1835. He later turned it into his story of Turin Turambar. Tolkien wrote the first drafts of Middle-earth in 1914, also touching on Eärendil. This makes Glaurung’s story part of Tolkien’s first-ever imaginings of Lord of the Rings and its mythology. Glaurung placed a spell on Turin’s sisterNienar, she forgets her past. Turin did not know her as an adult, so he was in love with Ninor when they met. Needless to say, it ended in tragedy.

Glaurung also saw the ruin of Nargothrond, which was the realm of the elf Finrod Felagund. Finrad was Galadriel’s brother, and this lesser-known Tolkien character founded one of the greatest kingdoms of the First Age before Glaurung invaded and took it over. Glaurung was the first dragon that Morgoth created, and He lasted a long time. As such, he was known as the father of dragons and may go down in Eldar lore as the worst and most devastating of them.

2

Anchorage

The greatest

Ancalagon the Black was known as the greatest of ​​Morgoth’s dragons, and was winged, unlike Glaurung. While the Flying Glaurung represented Morgoth’s first, tentative experiments in Dragonkind, Ancalagon was the lethal evolution of Glaurung. Both Glaurung and Ancalagon are confirmed in Tolkien’s stories as fire-drakes. Fire-Drakes are fire-breathing dragons known in the Elvish language of Quenya as Uruloki. Ancalagon fought on the side of Morgoth in the War of Wrath, one of the great wars of Belriand.

The War of Wrath was so cataclysmic that it sank most of the realm of Belriand, ending the First Age and beginning the Second. Ancalagon and the unnamed dragons fighting with him had a large hand in this extensive destruction. The great worm was killed by Elrond’s fatherEarendil the Mariner. With the help of the Great Eagles, Eärendil”Kill Ancalagon… and throw him from the sky; And he fell upon the towers of Thangodorim, and they were broken in his destruction.“The First Age fire-drake was never adapted for the screen, and neither was Glaurung, unlike Tolkien’s most famous dragon.

1

Smaug

The Golden

Smaug the Golden is, of course, the antagonist of The HobbitFound central importance in the second movie in Jackson’s Hobbit Trilogy. Bilbo and Thorin’s company took Smaug in The Hobbit: The Desolation of SmaugBut it was Bard of Lake-town who finally killed the beast. Smaug’s audacity and intelligence made him a whole new kind of dragon in the literary landscape of 1937, when The Hobbit was published first. Smaug exemplified a feature common to dragons in Middle-earth – the guarding and hoarding of wealth.

Flawlessly voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch in The Hobbit films, Smaug was living among a giant stash of treasure that he claimed as his own. Smaug removed Thorin’s ancestors from their home in Erebor, and took his place as master of the order, killing anyone who stood in his way. in The Lord of the RingsGandalf flagged to Frodo that “There is now no dragon left on earth in which the old fire is hot enough [to melt the Rings of Power].“This implies that Smaug may be the best known dragon in Middle-earth, but he is not the last.