I’m a little confused why people are still wildly speculating/making stuff up when this question has been pretty much definitively answered by Lightray in the 5th post…
It’s fun. Let me ask this related question: was Smaug drawn by the gold or by Thror’s ring?
In the book itself, the author makes it pretty clear that Smaug likes treasure for its own sake, just to possess and look at - he makes a remark at one point, when Bilbo steals a cup from his vast horde, that like most excessively rich and greedy people, the fact that he has no actual need of any of it made it more likely that he would notice a bit of it missing (rather than less likely).
That said, he does wear some of it, as noted upthread.
Story of my life.
I don’t usually correct the use on English in posts on the Net; but please, everyone – dragons hoard gold and jewels, i.e. accumulate such stuff until they have a hoard of it. A “horde” is a huge number of ravenous, destructive, plundering creatures – human or otherwise: for example, the Mongol hordes of times past.
ETA: the OP has the word right.
Says you. This is one of my favourite pieces of D&D art.
Expanding on this, because it’s one of my favorite fantasy books: The magic in *Dragonsbane *is based on singing, magic spells are essentially songs. For dragons, gold has an echo that “sings” back to them. It’s not for their advancement, but simply something they enjoy, it’s like meditation for them to sing to the gold and have it echo back.
This term I’ve given my new school roleplaying group Monsters as characters.
So we have a Dragon, a Centaur, a Naga etc.
I asked them what sort of ‘bedding’ each Monster would need (so they could then interact with the local village.)
Their replies:
- a Centaur needs a Stable (so find a carpenter)
- a Naga needs smooth rock (so find a stonemason)
- a Dragon needs … a big pile of treasure
So there it is - even teenagers know what dragons need gold for!
If Smaug was drawn by Thror’s ring, then the dragon would have followed the ring when it left. Since Smaug stayed with the gold, we must conclude that’s what he came for.
I suspect that the Arkenstone played a part in attracting Smaug’s attention. However, with only Glaurung and Smaug to infer from, what seems to draw dragons is “gold that is not already mine”. (since Scatha’s hoarde was contested by the dwarves afterwards, it is likely to have been their gold in the first place, too.) It’s implied that Smaug came just because he’d heard of the wealth of the Lonely Mountain, isn’t it?
It’s somewhat odd that Ancalagon the Black – supposedly the baddess dragon of the bunch – has no hoarde mentioned at all. Maybe Morgoth had a really good health plan, and Ancalagon was in therapy recovering from this hoarding tendencies? I mean, Smaug and Glaurung were at least at level three or four squalor – piles of their hoarde covering everything, won’t let anyone else in to see the situation – so presumably other dragons would be just as bad…
Ancalagon only appeared during the War of Wrath when he was unleashed.
Then he died - which tends to crimp the whole hoard accumulation exercise.
IIRC, Morgoth didn’t let Ancalagon off the leash all that often (unlike Glaurung, who apparently was given a general commission to suppress western Beleriand and then just sent off to do it). If Ancy was under Morgoth’s black and shriveled thumb most of the time, he may just not have been able to indulge in the “family vice”.
Of course, Ancalagon doesn’t feature in the Sil in quite as intimate a way as Glaurung does. He appears, torches a few thousand Elves and Men, then gets called back a couple of times. His biggest scene is his exit, when Ëarendil full-speed-aheads him into the Thangorodrim.
Just as an etymological aside: the word comes from the turcic/mongol, but it did not originally mean a huge number of ravening creatures, but merely a “camp”, with the extended meaning of “tribe”.
The word came to mean a vast number of plunderers in English and other languages because of the tendency among settled peoples to vasty over-estimate the numbers of their nomadic enemies - because the mobility of the latter led the settled peoples to imagine they were being invaded by overwhelmingly vast numbers of enemies.
Why do humans do the same? Why accumulate such vast wealth and displays of wealth that it’s obscene?
Mating ritual.
Whoops, yeah I missed that one. For what it’s worth, when I started writing my reply I don’t think either of you had posted yet. But you know, I saw something shiny and got distracted. Maybe dragons just have ADD?
Attention Deficit & Dragons?
And yet there are no dragon eggs in The Hobbit. Hm… :dubious:
Thanks. Brought to mind, commentary on a recent-ish speculative-fiction novel series, with premise of sudden change in the laws of physics at end of 20th century, throwing the world back to the technology of a millennium before – consequence, death of 95% of humankind, with the relatively primitive folk of Mongolia and thereabouts coming through rather better than most… someone said that – had they been there for that event – “given the chance, I’d go to Mongolia and start my own horde !”
Well, Tolkien being a devout Catholic and thus loath to get into anything at all sexual – and tending to minimise involvement of female characters of any kind, in his works – who knows what might have been, but which he steered clear of?
Ah. So they’re like bower birds.