Glaurung

Glaurung is the name under which the first of Morgoth's dragons is known throughout the Elder Days, and the works give it no gloss, so its meaning must be left open rather than guessed at. Around it cluster a number of by-names. He is titled the Father of Dragons, since every drake of Beleriand that came after was reckoned of his brood, and he is called simply the Worm, or the Great Worm of Angband, in the older sense of that word: a crawling serpent rather than a small creeping thing. He is also named the Golden, from the colour of his hide. In Quenya his kind are the Urulóki, the fire-drakes, and here the elements are transparent: the first belongs to the root for heat and burning, the second to lókë, a serpent or coiling thing, from a stem meaning to bend or loop.

He belonged to no people of Arda, but was a thing devised in Angband, bred by Morgoth in the pits beneath his fortress and brought forth as something the world had not seen before. Dragons were among the last and most deliberate of Morgoth's works, and Glaurung stood at their head: not a beast merely, but a creature of considerable understanding, housing a malice that answered to his master's purpose. In shape he was a wingless drake who moved upon the ground on four legs, immense, armoured in scale, and able to pour out fire; the winged kinds appeared only long afterwards.

What set him apart from the ordinary servants of Angband was his mind. He spoke, and used speech as a weapon, mingling truth with falsehood so skilfully that his words could not easily be untangled by those who heard them. His gaze carried a binding power, holding a man motionless and stripping him of will, and behind it lay a long memory and a patient, calculating cruelty. In this he was an instrument of Morgoth's will more than a soldier of his host, and his strength lay as much in what he could make others believe and do as in fire and armour.

Glaurung's first appearance belongs to the middle years of the Siege of Angband, in the two hundred and sixtieth year of the Sun, when the long quiet of the north had lasted so long that the Noldor had begun to trust it. He came out of the gates of Angband by night, still only half his eventual growth, and burned the northern edge of the grasslands of Ard-galen; the Elves fled before him, for they had never met such a creature and had no counsel against it. Fingon, riding from Hithlum with mounted archers, was the first to answer him: his horsemen circled the dragon and shot at him until, his armour still unfinished and his hide not yet proof against their arrows, he was hurt and turned back to Angband. Morgoth took no pleasure in the victory won against his servant, for Glaurung had shown himself before his time and revealed to the Eldar what was being made beneath the fortress. Thereafter the dragon kept out of sight for close on two hundred years, and the peace of Beleriand held, though the Elves who considered the matter understood that it would not hold for ever.

He came out a second time in the year 455, at the head of the assault that ended the Siege, and this time he was full-grown. Rivers of flame ran down from Thangorodrim before him and turned the green plain of Ard-galen into the dust and ash afterwards called Anfauglith; Glaurung came behind the fire with Balrogs and a great host of Orcs, and the fortified line the Noldor had held for nearly four centuries was broken in a single winter. The sons of Finarfin were driven from the northern marches, Dorthonion was overrun, and Angrod and Aegnor fell. Glaurung's part in that battle was less a matter of generalship than of sheer breaking force: he was the point of the spear that opened the north, and after it the Noldor never again besieged Morgoth but only defended what they still held.

Seventeen years later, in 472, he led Morgoth's forces in the field at the Nírnaeth Arnoediad. There his work was to divide: he came between the host of Fingon and the men of Maedhros advancing from the east, and his bulk and his fire kept the two armies from joining, so that each could be dealt with separately. Only the Dwarves of Belegost stood against him, for their war-masks turned aside the heat that drove other warriors back, and they hemmed him about until Azaghâl their lord, already dying beneath him, drove a knife into his belly. The wound was enough. Glaurung left the battlefield, and the Orcs who had followed him lost heart and fled with him, though the day was already lost for the Eldar and the Edain.

His last campaign, and the one for which he is chiefly remembered, was directed against Nargothrond in the year 495. He led an army south, and on the field of Tumhalad between Ginglith and Narog he broke the strength of the realm; Orodreth was slain there and Gwindor hurt to death. The stone bridge that had been built before the gates at Túrin's urging let the dragon come straight into the halls, and he took the place and heaped its wealth into a bed for himself. When Túrin came at last to the doors, Glaurung held him motionless and spoke to him, laying at his feet the ruin of Nargothrond and the abandonment of his kin, and while Túrin stood bound the captives were driven away northward past him, Finduilas among them, calling his name. Then the dragon let him go, having pointed him towards Dor-lómin and away from the road the prisoners had taken, and the choice that followed cost Finduilas her life.

In the following year Morwen and Nienor came out of Doriath with an escort under Mablung to learn what had become of Nargothrond, against all counsel. Glaurung was aware of them, and when the company drew near he came down to the water and raised a reek of vapour from the river that scattered the riders in the murk. Morwen was lost in it and never certainly found again. Nienor, borne away by her horse to the hill of Amon Ethir, met the dragon's eyes there, and he emptied her memory entirely, leaving her without name, kindred or speech. She fled south in that state, and so came at length to Brethil, where Túrin found her and, not knowing her, gave her the name Níniel.

Within the Elder Days Glaurung holds a place that no other creature of Morgoth's making occupies: he is at once the first of a kind and the pattern for what came after. The winged drakes loosed at the end of the age were a later development of the same craft, and the title given him sets him at the head of that line rather than merely first in order of time. His use in the war was correspondingly particular. He was not a captain in the ordinary sense, and where he stands in a battle his effect is to break a line or to keep two forces from closing rather than to direct a host; the marshalling was left to others. Just as often he was sent out alone, against a kingdom or against a single family, and it is in that employment that the works are most interested in him.

Fire and armoured bulk are the plainest of his weapons, but the narratives give far more attention to what he did with sight and speech. His manner with a captive was to fix him first and then to talk: to set before him an account of his own life in which no single statement could be shown false and none was whole, so that the hearer could neither believe it nor put it aside. He appears also to know matters he had no means of learning, naming kindred and circumstances never told him, which gave his words the force of evidence. The gaze worked as a compulsion in its own right, holding the body still and, in one instance, stripping a mind of everything it carried — and restoring it as readily at the end. Water and mist he could raise as vapour from a river, and his blood burned what it touched.

Only one bond in Glaurung's existence can properly be called obedience, and that is his bond to Morgoth. He is never shown taking counsel with the other captains of Angband, nor sharing command with the Balrogs who came behind him, and Sauron's dealings and his never intersect in the narratives. What he had instead was a commission. The long malice worked upon the house of Húrin was not his own quarrel but his master's, pronounced in Angband upon a prisoner Glaurung himself never confronted; the dragon was the hand that carried it into Beleriand, and the exactness with which he did so — knowing what he could not have witnessed, choosing the moment — marks him as the most trusted of that will rather than the most powerful of its soldiers.

With that house the relation runs strangely both ways. The chief heirloom of Hador's line was a helm made by Telchar of Nogrod bearing the likeness of Glaurung's head, so that the image of the dragon went before Túrin into battle and was dreaded by Morgoth's servants: the sign of the enemy borne as a defence. When the two at last stood face to face, Glaurung addressed Túrin by name and by lineage and took a particular interest in the names he had assumed, and afterwards he did not simply pass on to other work but returned twice more to the same family, at Amon Ethir and at the Teiglin. Of all his acts, these alone read as a pursuit rather than a campaign.

The dragon was present in the story from its earliest surviving telling, but under a different name and with the shape of his career only gradually settled. In the tale written during the First World War and published as "Turambar and the Foalókë", he is Glorund, and the title in the heading is an early Elvish compound of the words for hoard and serpent, describing the creature by his treasure rather than by his fire. Glorund is the form kept in the alliterative poem on Túrin begun in the 1920s, which breaks off long before the dragon's death and so never reaches the scene at the ravine. In the prose Quenta of about 1930 and in the Quenta Silmarillion of the later part of that decade the name has become Glómund, and it is only in the annals and revisions of the 1950s that the familiar Glaurung appears; the shift is one of sound rather than of conception, the same creature carried through successive phonological reworkings of the language.

The substance of his part changed less than might be expected. Already in the earliest tale he sacks the delved dwellings of an Elvish folk, there called the Rodothlim rather than Nargothrond, lies upon their gold, empties the sister's memory when she comes seeking news, and is killed by a stroke from beneath as the hero clings below the lip of a gorge, with the sword named Gurtholfin in place of the later Gurthang; the dying revelation of kinship is likewise present from the beginning. What the early version adds is a longer afterlife for the hoard: the dwarf Mîm, who in the finished legendarium has no dealings with dragons at all, first enters the writings as the solitary keeper of Glorund's treasure, and it is his curse upon that gold, rather than Morgoth's upon the house of Húrin alone, that carries the ruin forward into the tale of the Nauglafring. The dragon's own function was therefore stable early, while the machinery of doom around him was still being redistributed.