People sometimes ask why there are no dragon stories from the Second Age. In the development of Middle-earth, the Second Age was almost an after-thought, and it didn’t really call for dragons, although we have to assume for the sake of the pseudo-history that they were always there, in the background, waiting for an opportunity to make their appearance.
Dragons, like so many other literary devices, appear only rarely in the pages of Tolkien’s fiction. Only two dragons are featured prominently in the tales: Glaurung and Smaug. Glaurung had a high purpose. He was one of the prime characters in the tragic story of the children of Hurin. Smaug, on the other hand, was just an adventure. A goal for the Hobbit and Dwarves to reach. In the earliest versions of The Hobbit, all which came after Smaug’s death was quickly summarized. The dragon was the capstone of the story.
There are two more named dragons in Tolkien’s Middle-earth tales: Ancalagon the Black and Scatha the Worm. Ancalagon has no real story attached to him. Or, rather, he is barely more than a footnote in a much longer tale, The Silmarillion. He appears briefly in a final assault upon the Host of Valinor before Earendil slays him in the sky, culminating a night-long battle. Scatha is the core of a story told only as an anecdote about the Northman hero Fram, who slays the dragon and recovers a hoard taken from the Dwarves. Scatha’s death does not end Fram’s tale, however, for the Dwarves demand that he return their hoard and he refuses, so they kill him (or arrange for his death).
Fram’s story is unique. Turin mortally wounds Glaurung in the early hours of the morning and then kills himself soon afterward; Earendil slays Ancalagon in the dawn skies and then retreats into legend; Bard the Bowman slays Smaug in the night and goes on to become King of Dale. We know nothing about Fram’s encounter with Scatha, and he does not end either tragically, mythologically, or gloriously like his fellow dragon-slayers. He simply meets his death and the history of his people continues.
There is, however, a certain symmetry in these four dragon stories. Both Glaurung and Ancalagon served Morgoth, whereas Scatha and Smaug were at the very least semi-independent, if not completely independent of Sauron. Tolkien provides only one comment, in “The Quest of Erebor”, where Gandalf tells Frodo and other members of the Fellowship of the Ring that “the Dragon Sauron might use with terrible effect”. The clear implication is that Sauron either possessed or could have achieved some measure of control over Smaug, when he was ready to launch his final war against the northern world.
Nonetheless, one may entertain the strong impression that dragons were drifting away from the Dark Lords and assuming their own priorities by the end of the Third Age. In fact, after the Downfall of Sauron in the War of the Ring, dragons had to assume their own priorities.
But what happened with the beasties in the Second Age? There are no dragons in Numenor, and they are not mentioned in the brief accounts of the War of the Elves and Sauron or the War of the Last Alliance of Elves and Men. If there were dragon stories for the Second Age, what would be their purpose, and who would be their heroes?
In 1949 Tolkien wrote to Naomi Mitcheson, “I find ‘dragons’ a fascinating product of imagination. But I don’t think the Beowulf one is frightfully good. But the whole problem of the ‘intrusion’ of the dragon into northern imagination and its transformation there is one I do not know enough about. Fafnir in the late Norse versions of the Sigurd story is better; and Smaug and his conversation obviously is in debt here.” (Letter 122)
He didn’t view dragons as an innate part of northern myth, and it’s true that dragons occur in the earlier Greek mythologies which probably had some influence on northern mythology. Dragons were old when men were young, so to speak. And the men of Middle-earth became young again in the Second Age. The western Edain, wizened by their brush with Angband in the First Age, sailed over Sea to become the Numenoreans, High Men. Edainic peoples who stayed behind in Middle-earth enjoyed a millennium of peace and prosperity, in which they neither achieved anything great nor fell into darkness. They would have forgotten all they once knew about the darkness of the world, unless their Elven and Dwarven friends reminded them of the great wars of old.
So, is there room for dragons in the Second Age? The question beckons the imagination a bit hesitantly, because dragons are not only intrusive, they are disruptive. Glaurung led the way in turning the tide against the Eldar of Beleriand, and he destroyed Nargothrond. Smaug took out the Kingdom under the Mountain and Dale. When a dragon appears, heroes need to be close by and handy, or else all the world tumbles into darkness.
Dragonkind could not have troubled the northern world of the Eldar and the Edain prior to the War of the Elves and Sauron, but if we hear little about Lindon, Eriador, and Rhovanion in the Second Age, we hear virtually nothing about the far eastern lands of Middle-earth. We know only that the dragons fled east from the ruin of Angband, and did not trouble the world for many years after.
But if dragons settled in the Withered Heath and nursed their wounds, why did they not recover quickly? The tales of Glaurung and Smaug show these creatures were powerful and cunning. It may be that the early dragons depended upon Morgoth’s evil will, and much like Sauron’s Ring of Power their apparent autonomy of will was more a disassociated act of their master’s malice. That is, the early dragons could have been reduced to an almost mindless state once Morgoth was gone.
Such creatures would be able to breed true, and having the capacity for intelligence would eventually have recovered it or developed it. But would that process have required 5,000 years? Or, can those of us who long for tales of courage and daring-do in the Second Age rationalize an adventure among the scaly beasts before Sauron could make full use of them?
Dragons could have migrated further east in the early part of the Second Age, spreading their primitive beastly terror among the distant and darkened lands where the Eldar and Dunedain had no contacts and all records perished. There dragons could have become fearsom demigods, through no wit of their own, among primitive men who would know no better than to think that Morgoth had sent them.
Sauron indeed began to organize the evil creatures which had once served Morgoth after about the fifth century of the Second Age. He stayed far away from Lindon and Eriador, but not so far that Gil-galad didn’t hear rumor of someone or something moving in the shadows. When Gil-galad shared his concerns with Tar-Meneldur, the Elvenking wrote: “A new shadow rises in the East. It is no tyranny of evil Men, as your son believes; but a servant of Morgoth is stirring, and evil things wake again. Each year it gains in strength, for most Men are ripe to its purpose. Not far off is the day, I judge, when it will become too great for the Eldar unaided to withstand.”
However, Gil-galad’s letter reached Tar-Meneldur in the year 882, and Sauron did not even begin establishing Mordor as a stronghold until around the year 1000. “The Tale of Years” in The Lord of the Rings says that it was Sauron’s alarm at the growing power of the Numenoreans which led him to make Mordor as his new home. The Numenoreans had not, by that time, established any permanent havens in Middle-earth. But Sauron must have foreseen the time was not far off when they would do just that.
It’s all very vague and mysterious, and one wonders what the heck was going on in the wastelands of eastern Middle-earth. Aldarion, while he was still sailing to Middle-earth and scouting out the lands for Gil-galad, doesn’t seem to have met any dragons. Tolkien surely would have mentioned such an encounter. And Aldarion doesn’t seem to have strayed far from water anyway. His role was chiefly as an ambassador on behalf of Gil-galad, who sought out Men deliberately, to either forge alliances with them, or to gain knowledge about them and perhaps to forestall their succumbing to the influence of the dark power he had perceived as stirring in the east.
So if dragons were part of Sauron’s scheme, they must not have been very effective for him in those early years. Why else did they not scrape the Elves off the scorched earth of Eriador? Dragons would have to be some sort of disappointment to Sauron, at least by the middle of the Second Age, or else they should have served him as a powerful weapon in his wars with the Elves.
On the other hand, we are led to believe that many tribes of Edainic Men and perhaps several Elven nations vanished from the lands east of the Misty Mountains in the War of the Elves and Sauron. Sauron did not simply march against Eregion. He launched a campaign against the Longbeard Dwarves and their Edainic allies which all but destroyed the northern peoples. The essay “Dwarves and Men” (The Peoples of Middle-earth) describes the war so:
Very great changes came to pass as the Second Age proceeded. The first ships of the Numenoreans appeared off the coasts of Middle-earth about Second Age 600, no rumour of this portent reached the distant north. At the same time, however, Sauron came out of hiding and revealed himself in fair form. For long he paid little heed to the Dwarves or Men and endeavoured to win the friendship and trust of the Eldar. But slowly he reverted again to the allegiance of Morgoth and began to seek power by force, marashalling and directing the Orks and other evil things of the First Age, and secretly building his great fortress in the mountain-girt land in the South that was afterwards known as Mordor. The Second Age had reached only the middle of its course (c. Second Age 1695) when he invaded Eriador and destroyed Eregion, a small realm established by the Eldar migrating from the ruin of Beleriand that had formed an alliance also with the Longbeards of Moria. This marked the end of the Alliance of the Longbeards with Men of the North. For though Moria remained impregnably for many centuries, the Orks reinforced and commanded by servants of Sauron invaded the mountains again. Gundabad was re-taken, the Ered Mithrin infested and the communication between Moria and the Iron Hills for a time cut off. The Men of the Alliance were involved in war not only with Orks but with alien Men of evil sort. For Sauron had acquired dominion over many savage tribes in the East (of old corrupted by Morgoth), and he now urged them to seek land and booty in the West. When the storm passed, the Men of the old Alliance were diminished and scattered, and those that lingered on in their old regions were impoverished, and lived mostly in caves or in the borders of the Forest.
Who were these “servants of Sauron” who reinforced and commanded the Orks? They could not be Nazgul, for the Nazgul had not yet come to be. They might be lesser Maiar, but the War of Wrath seems to have depleted their ranks tremendously. Gil-galad’s identification of the power in the East as a servant of Morgoth indicates that he, at least, believed one or more of Morgoth’s former lieutenants had survived the war. Such a servant could only be immortal, and therefore had to be a lesser Maia. But Morgoth had once been served by multitudes of Maiar, and though few are named or described, their numbers were sufficient that the Valar seldom took direct action against them.
Some people speculate that the dragons might be incarnations of lesser Maiar, who also seem to have taken shape as were-wolves and vampires and Orcs. But dragons were powerful, and Morgoth bred them. Tolkien implied strongly that reproducing biologically weakened the Maiar, at least to the point where they lost the ability to change their shape (this point, discussed in a couple of essays, including the “Ossanwe-kenta”, is not canonically established). If the principle of diminishment through biological reproduction were true, then dragons could not be bred from lesser Maiar, for they seem to have increased in power in the Third Age.
It may be, therefore, that dragons could have fallen to a more primitive state in the Second Age, deprived of the will of Morgoth, and that Sauron made use of them in the East to establish his control over Men and Orcs. But though he would have used the power of the One Ring to control his servants by the time of the War of the Elves and Sauron, he may not have had sufficient time to raise dragons back to their primal state. If he utilized them in the war, then brave deeds by Elves, Dwarves, and Men against dragons could have reset the clock. That is, while still little more than great beasts, powerful and terrifying in their native state, dragons would not have possessed the cunning and malice of a Glaurung or Ancalagon.
Sauron could have miscalulated and simply used up his dragon-stock too soon, depriving himself of potential great servants and captains. Hence, if the dragons were reduced to weak and simple-minded creatures without Morgoth’s will, the loss of great numbers of dragons in the War of the Elves and Sauron could have forced Sauron to turn his attention to other means of extending his power. By the end of the Second Age, when Sauron was moving against Gondor, dragons may no longer have fit into his plans.
So, one can easily surmise there must have been battles with dragons in the Second Age, perhaps even grand battles where the dragons served as powerful war beasts much like elephants in the classical world (or the Oliphaunts of the Southrons in The War of the Ring). But these dragons lacked the great intellect of the more powerful creatures of legend. They would eventually recover that malice and cunning, and breed true to their kind. But it would be thousands of years before they could achive their comeback.
And so there should be no stories of great dragon-slayers from the Second Age. The dragons could not threaten the Eldar and the Dunedain, who were steeped in the lore of ages, great warriors, and capable of taking on the most dread of all Morgoth’s servants. Dragons worked best for the dark lords when they had large numbers, and the Elves feared them, and Men could not withstand them. Without the guidance of Morgoth and Sauron, dragons must have learned to fend for themselves, much as the Orcs did. But whereas the Orcs could breed quickly and replenish their numbers, dragons may not have produced the numbers Sauron would have required to use them effectively.
Dragon-hunting should never have become a popular passtime among Elves and Men, but there had to be a reason dragons returned to or stayed in the far north for so long. Permitting a young warrior to kill a dragon as a right of passage would belittle the power and terror of these marvelous monsters. Tolkien would never have written a story about a Man killing a weak and mindless dragon. Better to let the dragons sleep quietly in the shadows until they were ready to burst upon the world once again.
And perhaps that is what really happened to dragons. Like the Balrog under Moria, maybe they fled to holes in the far north and laid themselves down to sleep, and so passed through the Second Age unscathed, unused, and only began to rouse from their ancient slumber in the Third Age when Men and Dwarves accidentally woke them. Instead of declining into a primitive bestial state, the dragons waited until a time came when they could once again make their mark upon the world.
This article was originally published on August 4, 2001.
