Q: Were there still any dragons in Middle-earth by the time of the War of the Ring?
ANSWER: Dragons remain a popular topic among Tolkien fans. This question was submitted in August 2017 and every time I look at it I think to myself, “I am sure I have answered this question many times.” And yet, I haven’t really addressed the point very fully. I did write an answer to “Was Smaug the Last Dragon in Middle-earth?” in November 2011. The short answer (then, as now) was “No.” Smaug was NOT the last dragon in Middle-earth.
Scottish novelist and poet Naomi Mitchison asked J.R.R. Tolkien about this and he gave her this answer in Letter No. 144:
…Dragons. They had not stopped; since they were active in far later times, close to our own. Have I said anything to suggest the final ending of dragons? If so it should be altered. The only passage I can think of is Vol. I p. 70 : ‘there is not now any dragon left on earth in which the old fire is hot enough’. But that implies, I think, that there are still dragons, if not of full primeval stature….
As I mentioned then, Tolkien was probably implying that Chrisophylax Dives of Farmer Giles of Ham was one of those later dragons “not of full primeval stature”.
I vaguely recall a discussion from long ago about dragons in Middle-earth. Someone asked if dragons survived past Smaug’s death then why didn’t Sauron use them? Or why would Tolkien have written another story about a dragon? He seemed to have abandoned the great, terrible dragons of his early myths. The questions beg to be answered but Tolkien himself seems to have been quite done with dragons after 1948 (about the time Farmer Giles of Ham was published).
Everything dragon-related in Tolkien’s published works was either composed prior to The Lord of the Rings (written 1937-48, 50-55) or was merely a revision of older notes and texts (mostly in the mid-1950s). Two poems, “The Hoard” (republished in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil) and “The Dragon’s Visit” (originally published in Oxford University Magazine, but you can read the poem with a commentary here), were both pre-LoTR works. “The Dragon’s Visit” was composed in a silly, entertaining style.
In Letter No. 122, which Tolkien sent to Naomi Mitchison in December 1949 after she praised Farmer Giles of Ham, he wrote:
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 there.
Mitcheson was very interested in the subject of dragons, publishing Graeme and the Dragon (Faber and Faber, 1954) around the same time. The book is out of print, despite being re-issued in 1970. I don’t know anything about it except its title and the fact it was inspired by her grandson, Graeme.
The green dragon of “The Dragon’s Visit” is a little more silly than Psamathos of Roverandom, and maybe Smaug represents a last final attempt by Tolkien to create a serious, terrible dragon worthy of ancient myth and legend. And yet despite the humorous intent of “The Dragon’s Visit” there is at at least one nod to myth and legend in the poem: the green dragon comes from Finis-Terre, which might seem the name of a mythical place.
In fact, Cape Finisterre is a peninsula on the northern coast of Spain, in Galicia. In ancient times the region was known as “the edge of the (known) world”. The apostle James is said to have visited the cape, and along the way he and a companion encountered or passed by a dragon that was transformed into the peak of Picosacro (Pico Sacro), also known as Ilicinio. In another legend, James’ tomb was supposed to be located on the summit but a dragon forced his followers to bury him elsewhere.
I don’t know if Tolkien was familiar with these stories, but I am sure he would have found them appealing. The story of a tomb on a peak resonates in the Tradition of Elendil, which was published in Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth. There is another connection in Tolkien’s fiction with Spain. Narvi, the maker of the Doors of Durin, shares a name with Narvesund, which was an old Norse name for Gibraltar (maybe).
The absence of dragons in the main plot for The Lord of the Rings signals a state of decline for them. The greatest of ancient dragons was Ancalagon the Black, although Glaurung was the dragon who earned most of Tolkien’s attention. With Smaug’s death the great dragons of old came to an end. And though we are told that they had flourished for centuries in the Withered Heath of the north, it could be that somewhere in the back of Tolkien’s mind they were driven from the cold northern wastes and had to seek a new home.
I rather imagine dragons sleeping through the War of the Ring, still cowed by the death of Smaug. They were waiting for a new generation to rise up and threaten the world of Dwarves, Men, and Elves. But maybe Tolkien imagined a different place for them in later ages, a warmer land close to the ocean. Spain was old and mysterious and had once been home to ancient civilizations long forgotten. Some people even believed in Tolkien’s time that remnants of Atlantis might be found there, and Atlantis was his Númenor.
So, yes, there must still have been dragons by the time of the War of the Ring. Tolkien wrote about Chrysophylax in the 1940s, about the time he finished the main narrative for LoTR, or while writing its last chapters. And yet while he was never quite sure about how they should fit into northern myth, he had already entertained the idea that they sought homes in faraway places where they might be undisturbed. There was Spain, of course, and the moon. I think the thing about Tolkien’s dragons is that despite their great power they seem to spend a lot of their time avoiding contact with the races of Dwarves, Elves, and Men. Chrysophylax appears to have lived somewhere in or near Wales.
So maybe during the War of the Ring at least some of the dragons were looking for a new home, and that is why they didn’t meet an untimely and bitter end.
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I really like your answer as it applies to a very real world feeling.
From various sources I have inferred that Dragons, along with Balrogs and such, were the equal of Sauron and were working “only” together because of Morgoth. In the third age I see, Sauron can only deal with the Dragons, not control , so perhaps he simply didn’t have the right swag to offer them. 🙂