The fire-drakes; Dragons who breathed fire. Glaurung, Father of Dragons, was the first of these. He first appeared in the year I 260, but he would later be slain, and many of his kind were destroyed in the War of Wrath at the end of the First Age. Nonetheless, at least some of the urulóki certainly survived the downfall of their master, Morgoth.
Ancalagon apparently belonged to this kind,1 and Smaug, the great fire-breathing Dragon that sacked Erebor, seems to have been the last of the great urulóki. Other lesser types apparently survived to the end of the Third Age and beyond.2
Singular Difficulties
This description of Glaurung contains a subtle peculiarity: urulóki is a plural, not a singular form, and doesn't seem to fit here (as if the sentence said, 'Glaurung the Dragons'). The original manuscript for this section reads:
Commentary to §277 of The Grey Annals
in The War of the Jewels
(The History of Middle-earth volume XI)
(our emphasis)
Here, J.R.R. Tolkien uses the singular urulókë, which seems to fit much more easily into the sentence.
The reasons for this change are mysterious. Conceivably, the published Silmarillion is in error, and should read 'Glaurung the Urulókë'. It's equally possible, though, that Christopher Tolkien had good reasons for making the change - perhaps he had access to material unknown to us, or simply wanted to avoid confusing the reader (since the plural form occurs earlier in the Silmarillion).
Notes
1 |
Some sources prefer to exclude flying Dragons like Ancalagon from the urulóki. Tolkien himself gives us no solid details on this point, so there is no clear basis for classification. The use of Elvish lókë, 'serpent', might seem to suggest a flightless creature, but English dragon (originally Greek drakon) carries exactly the same meaning. Hence 'dragon', 'drake', 'serpent' and the related 'worm' can be used interchangeably when referring to these creatures, and say nothing about their appearance. |
2 |
In The Fellowship of the Ring I 2 The Shadow of the Past, Gandalf tells Frodo that, since the passing of Smaug, '...there is not now any dragon left on earth in which the old fire is hot enough...', so at least some Dragons of this kind must have remained on Earth at that time. |
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- Updated 8 April 2000
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