Smaug

Smaug is known by a small cluster of titles rather than by any recorded lineage-name. The traditions of Dwarves and Men in Wilderland call him Smaug the Golden, after the red-gold sheen of his hide and the hoard he holds, and Smaug the Terrible, the style Thorin Oakenshield uses in recounting how the Lonely Mountain was lost. The grander forms, Magnificent and the Chiefest and Greatest of Calamities, arise in a single exchange in the deep halls of Erebor: both are offered in flattery by an intruder who has learned that a dragon likes to be addressed handsomely, and the worm accepts them without correcting a word. They tell more about his vanity than about any formal usage. The tale gives the name Smaug no meaning in the languages of Middle-earth; Tolkien remarked only that it should rhyme with English 'cow', not with 'vogue' or 'smog'.

In kind he is a fire-drake: a winged, fire-breathing worm, and by the reckoning of the chronicles the greatest dragon of his age. He came out of the North, where such creatures were still to be found in the earlier centuries of the Third Age; the desolate country beyond the Grey Mountains, the Withered Heath, is named as the place where the great worms bred, though nothing is said of his parentage or of where in particular he was hatched. He is very large, armoured in scale, and long lying upon gold has pressed a crust of gems and precious metal into his softer underside. His senses are correspondingly formidable — a keen nose, and an exact inventory in memory of every piece of the treasure beneath him. Like the dragons of the elder days he speaks, reasons, and delights in riddling talk, and his voice carries a sleepy compulsion that a listener is wise to distrust.

The older matter sets this kind in a longer history. Dragons were bred in Angband by Morgoth, Glaurung being the first to come forth, and winged fire-drakes appeared only in the last assault of the Elder Days, when the hosts of the West broke his power. Smaug's own descent from that brood is nowhere set down, but he stands at the far end of the line, and by the time of his rise no rival of comparable strength is recorded. In Gandalf's later assessment, preserved in the account of how the quest to Erebor came about, Smaug was the last of the truly great dragons, and therefore an asset that the Enemy might one day turn against the peoples of the North — a calculation that had as much to do with his existence as with anything he had already done.

The events that drew Smaug south are recorded in the annals of Durin's Folk. In the twenty-sixth century of the Third Age the Longbeards held halls in the Grey Mountains, but worms out of the northern wastes pressed them hard, and in 2589 Dáin I was killed at his own doors by a cold-drake. His son Thrór withdrew the greater part of the people to the Lonely Mountain in the following year and there rebuilt the kingdom, while a second company under Grór settled in the Iron Hills. Erebor prospered: the smiths of the mountain worked in league with the Men of Dale beneath it, and the hoard of the King under the Mountain grew until report of it travelled far. Such report was precisely what a dragon listens for.

In 2770 he came down upon the mountain out of the north. The assault was swift and total: the front gate was forced, the halls were taken, and Dale was burned, its lord Girion killed among those who came out against the worm. Thrór escaped with his son Thráin II by a small door in the western side of the mountain, of which the dragon knew nothing; his grandson Thorin was outside the mountain when the worm came and so was not in the halls at all, and the surviving Dwarves scattered into a long exile that carried them at last to the Blue Mountains. Smaug gathered what remained of the wealth of two peoples into the lower hall and lay down on it. The country round about was scorched bare and came to be called the Desolation; the Men who stayed in the region withdrew to Esgaroth on the Long Lake, where a town stood on piles out over the water.

For a century and seventy years nothing disturbed him, and he was seen less and less; in the reckoning of Lake-town he had passed almost into a story told to children. The means of his undoing meanwhile passed quietly from hand to hand. Thrór had kept a map of the mountain marked with the hidden western door, and its key with it; these he gave to Thráin before his own death in Moria. When Thráin was taken and imprisoned in Dol Guldur, Gandalf found him dying there in 2850 and received the map and key without at first understanding what they were. Only later, weighing what a living dragon in the North might be worth to the Enemy, did he bring them to Thorin and press the case for the journey.

The company set out in the spring of 2941 and reached the mountain late in the year. The hidden door was opened on Durin's Day, and their burglar, Bilbo Baggins, went down the passage alone and carried off a two-handled cup while the dragon slept. Smaug did not wake at that moment but stirred and sank into other dreams; when he did wake he knew the loss exactly, and came out in a fury; he searched the mountainside, destroyed the ponies and the camp on the eastern slope, and circled the peak until near dawn. Bilbo went down a second time and found him awake and waiting. In the conversation that followed the hobbit gave no name but a series of riddling ones, flattered him into rolling over to display his armoured belly, and saw what he had come for: a patch in the hollow of the left breast where the crust of gems had not taken.

The powers actually exhibited are physical and mental together. His fire was sufficient to burn a timber town built out over water, his strength to force the gate of a dwarf-kingdom and, at need, to break stone from the flank of the mountain; he could fly the length of the Long Lake by night and remain aloft over a fight. Against his hide the bowmen of Esgaroth spent their shafts to no effect, and the single weapon that ever pierced him found the one gap in his armour rather than the armour itself. To this is joined a quality of mind unusual even among his kind: he preferred to question an intruder before killing him, and he used what he learned. The hoard itself worked as an extension of him. Bilbo felt the pull of it in the lower hall, and the Master of Lake-town, given a share of the recovered gold, carried it off into the waste and starved there — a sickness the survivors named for the dragon.

Smaug's is a life without kin. No mate, no brood, no fellow worm appears anywhere in the record of his years beneath the Lonely Mountain, and no lord, servant or confederate is named for him either. What stands in the place of family is enmity, and the longest of these was with Durin's Folk — an enmity carried on almost entirely at a distance. In the century and a half that he lay in Erebor he neither met nor spoke with Thrór, Thráin or Thorin; for the exiled house he defined a claim and a grievance handed down through three generations, while to him the Dwarves were a category rather than persons, recognised by smell and credited with a fixed hunger for their own gold that he expected would bring them back one day.

The single exception is his exchange with Bilbo Baggins, the only conversation of his that the tale preserves. He allowed the intruder to speak, pressed him for a name, and took evident pleasure in being addressed with ceremony; the hobbit, following the caution the story records against giving a dragon one's name outright, answered in riddles. It is the one relation in which Smaug is handled as a person rather than endured as a disaster, and the handling ran both ways: each came away with something the other had not meant to give.

The Rankin/Bass television film of 1977 was the first screen version to give the dragon a voice, and it belonged to Richard Boone, who read the part with a slow, dry menace rather than the purring courtesy of the printed exchange. Because the whole novel is compressed into a single broadcast hour and a quarter, Smaug's long dominion over the mountain is disposed of in a brief prologue, and the intervals that separate Bilbo's descents into the lower hall largely disappear, so that the theft of the cup, the second conversation and the discovery of the bare patch follow one another almost without pause. The film also has little room to prepare the man who kills him: Bard is introduced only shortly before he draws, which leaves the arrow looking like a stroke of fortune rather than the last act of a displaced inheritance. The thrush is kept, and with it the chain by which the knowledge reaches the bowman.

In Peter Jackson's trilogy the dragon is performed by Benedict Cumberbatch, who supplied both the voice and, through motion capture, the basis of the creature's movement and expression; the same actor also voices the Necromancer of Dol Guldur. Smaug is held back to a glimpse at the close of the first film, occupies the second, which is named for him, and dies at the opening of the third — a rearrangement that moves his destruction out of the middle of the story and makes it the overture to the war over the hoard. The largest departure is an extended sequence in which Thorin and the company face the dragon inside Erebor and attempt to drown him in molten gold from the reawakened forges; in the book the Dwarves never meet him at all, and no one but Bilbo speaks with him. Bilbo also sets the Ring aside during their conversation, where the novel keeps him invisible throughout. At Lake-town, Bard is a smuggler and a prisoner before he is an archer, and he looses the black arrow from an improvised mounting on a bell tower with his son beside him, rather than from among the town's bowmen.