So Smaug is pretty much the embodiment of the classic “dragon hoard” trope. And in fact, when I looked up the trope, I noticed it had already raised the very question I was going to ask:
What the heck does Smaug (or any dragon) need with a shit-ton of gold?
He can’t eat it.
He can’t wear it.
He can’t really spend it. At least not in any way that wouldn’t seem comical and absurd.
Other than swimming around in it like Scrooge McDuck or maybe guarding the treasure for a wizard or whoever, why do dragons like gold so much?
I’ve only seen one explanation other than, “ooh, shiny!” One author created dragons who needed to consume gold in order to breathe fire. Of course, I can’t recall who the author was or what the book was, so it’s not terribly useful.
But usually it’s just Greed personi— er, dragonified.
In Tolkien’s Legendarium, dragons like Smaug covet gold and wealth because they were creations of Morgoth, whose nature was greed. The evil spirit within Glaurung the forefather of dragons displays its evil by such covetousness – just as coveting the One Ring displays it’s (and Sauron’s) evil nature.
However, Tolkien was harkening back to legends such as Sigurd. In those myths, the cause and effect are somewhat reverse – dragons become dragons because they covet gold. Fafnir and then Andvari become dragons to protect their gold. And dragon gold carries their curse – Andvarinaut (the ring that inspired, in part, the One Ring) doomed its owners by their greed for it.
C.S. Lewis played with the same trope – the dead dragon the Dawn Treader encounters on one of the isles was a lord who turned into a dragon because he was brooding over the gold horde he coveted. Eustace suffers the same fate by taking part of the horde.
Tolkien kept the association of dragons with dragons’ gold, but dropped the cause of why there was a dragon with the gold in the first place, in favor of his own origin. Popular culture has done the rest.
Perhaps you’re misremembering Barbara Hambly’s Dragonsbane series, wherein dragons horde gold because they need it for their magical/spiritual advancement?
I don’t recall any eats-gold-to-breathe-fire dragons… given the limited amount of gold on Earth, that seems like a quickly self-limiting problem. Unless dragons have some sort of technology to reclaim gold from seawater, I suppose.
But I read a LOT of crap S&S as a kid, including lots of anthologies. I can’t even recall if it was a novel, series, short story or the back of a cereal box.
Was it Peter Dickinson’s Flight of Dragons? He theorized that dragons used gold coins for bedding because traditional materials, like straw or wool, would catch fire too easily. Gold coins made a bed that conformed to the dragon’s body shape, didn’t catch fire, and didn’t get tarnished by the dragon’s various toxic secretions.
Because gold is resistant to hydrochloric acid, of course!
Ah, you beat me to it. As I recall, Dickinson explained the dragons’ flight and fire breath were the result of hydrogen gas produced by an abundance of hydrochloric acid. So it’s only natural they’d want their bed to be both fire and acid resistant.
The dragons in the Temeraire series love their bling too. Some of it is status consciousness, some is “ooh, shiny!”, but mostly the gifts are seen as a sign of affection from their captains.
IIRC correctly, there was one good effect for Smaug lounging on his treasure all day. I don’t know how to do a spoiler box, since not everyone has read the book, so I will try to play with the font color. Highlight the next couple lines:
The jewels encrust Smaug’s underbelly, creating “impenetrable” armor. Of course, this becomes his downfall…
Someone PM me about how to do spoiler boxes, please?
