Tolkien also stated that other dragons lived during the Third Age: an unnamed “great cold-drake” killed the Dwarf Dáin I and his son Frór in the Ered Mithrin, and “rumour of the wealth of Erebor… reached the ears of the dragons”, of whom Smaug was the greatest, but not the only, example. The most famous dragon of Middle-earth is almost certainly Smaug, whose demise came at the hands of Bard “the Bowman” of Dale. Fram was said, afterwards, to have been killed by Dwarves, whose treasure hoard the “long-worm” Scatha had occupied and which Fram refused to return (although he did, rather mockingly, send them a dragon-teeth necklace). Fram, the the son of Frumgar, chieftain of the Éothéod, the ancestors of the Rohirrim who lived “in the Vales of Anduin between the Carrock and the Gladden Fields”, slew the “great dragon of Ered Mithrin” (the Grey Mountains north of Mirkwood) a millennium before the War of the Ring. No dragons were recorded by Tolkien as being active in the Second Age, but the Third - in which The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings take place - saw two named ones, both killed by Men. Ancalagon “the Black” was “the mightiest of the dragon host” that fought on behalf of the Dark Lord Morgoth in the War of Wrath that ended the First Age, slain by the half-Man, half-Elf Eärendil from his flying ship Vingilot in Middle-earth’s first aerial battle. Glaurung was the “Father of Dragons” who led the sack of the great underground Elf fortress-kingdom Nargothrond and was, later, killed by Turin Turambar, the most tragic human hero of the First Age. Only four were definitively named: Glaurung and Ancalagon, both in the First Age Scatha and Smaug, both in the Third. In his seminal work Beowulf: the Monster and the Critics, Tolkien noted that in myth “there are… many heroes but very few good dragons.” And in On Fairy Stories he confessed that he “desired dragons with a profound desire.” īut Tolkien, despite a fascination with dragons, deployed them sparingly and judiciously in his writings. Tolkien, who acknowledged that his very first attempt at fiction-writing, when he was seven, centered around a “great green dragon.”

Why did Tolkien imagine only men killing dragons?ĭragons were very important to J.R.R.

Are there reasons why only Men slay dragons in the world of Arda, and not elves or dwarves? Read on and find out! In this new TORn library piece, guest writer Dr Timothy Furnish explores dragons and dragon-slaying in the Tolkien-verse. Glaurung the dragon, one of the chief weapons Morogth used to defeat the Eldar in Beleriand.

Dragon slayers of ered mithrin