It’s a good thing that Smaug didn’t catch Bilbo fingering his golden cup! :eek:
Folks, it’s the human mating ritual that accumulates obscene amounts of wealth.
For all we know, dragons are asexual. Tolkien refers to all the known dragons as males, IIRC.
Either that, or Smaug is waiting for his mating ritual to pay off and attract a dragoness. (Unfortunately, this may be the same mating ritual as dwarves employ… and we’re not so clear on how good they are at distinguishing secondary sexual characteristics, either.)
(Poor guy is there lounging on his bed with mood lighting waiting for some boom-chikka-wa-wa, and suddenly its all dwarves! in his crib. It’s like bringing home flowers and getting a faceful of bees instead of some nookie.)
I just want to point out that those winged beasts we saw in the Lord Of The Rings trilogy were not dragons. IIRC they were dinosaurs. Sauron sees them in their natural state and detects evil in a few. Those few he feeds a special magical, evil diet. This makes them bigger, stronger, meaner, and allows them to survive the ages.
IIRC (and I may not) Smaug is the last dragon.
Oh, and the spiders that Radgast saw in the first Hobbit film are the children of Shelob, who we met in ROTK.
…therefore providing proof that no matter how butt-ugly you are, and what a terrible person you are, someone, somewhere, will have sex with you.
I bet she ate the poor bastard afterwards too.
I recall a short story in the Sword and Sorceress anthologies where an adventurer in a large library reads a book on dragons where it mentioned that dragons liked hoarding things, but exactly what they hoarded is different from dragon to dragon. Many like gold, but other dragons hoard different things. He stole the book to consult later - and was ambushed and devoured in the night by the librarian. Turns out dragons can shapeshift too…
I recall in Wu-Ling’s Folly, one of Alan Dean Foster’s Mad Amos stories the dragon in question wanted gold just to eat it.
That reminds me of dragons in Mercedes Lackey’s Five Hundred Kingdoms series; having a large hoard is mentioned as being attractive to other dragons. Also, they do it because according to stories dragons have hoards, and there’s a compulsive effect to stories in that universe.
Why does a dragon hoard gold? Because he’s a dragon. It’s his nature.
I’m not sure if they’re children of Shelob, although they’re definitely other descendants of Ungoliant. So, more like Shelob’s cousins. JRRT mentions them somewhere in the Letters, IIRC.
In one of my game settings, the dragons are effectively immortal remnants of a fallen civilization; everyone they knew and cared about is long since dust. Their hoards are mementos, reminders of the people and places they once knew, collected and protected as a bulwark against the relentless years. A dragon may well value a crude clay amulet above a jeweled scepter, because the amulet was made by a child the dragon loved, once upon a time.
One of the dragons has made it her work to collect and preserve every scrap of writing that survived the fall of her people. A few scholars have persuaded her to read selected tomes to them, but no one is allowed to touch the books.
So some dragons hoard old books and magazines like an episode of Hoarders?
They’re also in the Silmarillion in the Nan Dungortheb found north of Doriath.
The trouble with “Flight of Dragons” is there are some places that don’t have limestone, so a dragon has to eat a lot of humans and animals for the bones.
I haven’t read the book since high school, but doesn’t some dude accidentally fuck his own sister in The Silmarillion?
Because not all dragons come from the same source. D&D dragons, St. George, Asian, etc. all display the treasure trope but not necessarily from the Tolkien mythology.
Yes, but it takes Morgoth, the mightiest and most evil Earth-bound being of all, to engineer the whole thing. All the other baddies are limited to killing and torture.
I don’t recall St. George’s dragon hoarding anything; it was rampaging across the countryside, but not brooding on a horde like, say, Beowulf’s dragon.
I’m mostly familiar with the dragon myths of Japan and China, but they too don’t tend to be hoarders of wealth – they have treasures, to be sure, and maybe palaces and such, but they’re more spirits or deities in charge of various natural phenomena than they are menaces sitting on a pile of gold.
D&D dragons, of course, draw heavily from Tolkien. And also from Tolkien’s inspirations (e.g., Sigurd, Beowulf).
Russian and Slavic “dragons”, AFAIK, don’t hoarde treasure in the same way, either.
“Dragon sitting on a pile of gold” tends to derive squarely from the same Norse/Germanic legends that Tolkien sourced from, and from whence popular culture has also drawn.
Yeah, Turin, the original emo-kid. But that was actually BECAUSE of a dragon. Turin hadn’t seen his sister since she was a little girl, and he’d been gone a long time. When she grew up, she went looking for hiim but found Glaurung, who erased her memory. When Turin found her, he didn’t recognize her as an adult, and she didn’t remember him, so they fell in love. Eventually, Glaurung removed his memory block, she realized that she’d had sex with her brother, and she threw herself and their unborn child off a cliff.
This was, as the_diego noted, entirely due to Morgoth’s desire for hurting Turin’s father (whom Morgoth had chained up outside his fortress so he could watch all of this happening) as much as humanly (well, Ainurly) possible.
Mainly Dragon Magazines.
Also other magazines (depending on age category).
She wasn’t a little kid- she wasn’t even born when he left. You’re probably getting Nienor mixed up with her older sister, who died young.
Magazines about dragons or regular magazines like Time or Newsweek giant-sized for dragons?