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Where Have All the Dragons Gone? - Page 5

© Michael Martinez

Earendil must have done some fancy talking to get Manwe's permission to lead a counter-assault against the dragons. He had been forbidden to return to Middle-earth, and the will of the Valar wasn't something one easily turned aside. So the situation in Beleriand (or what remained of it) must have been desperate. And one must ask how Earendil could fight the dragons from a flying ship anyway? He had the Silmaril with him but was that all? Or did he, like Bard thousands of years later, wield a bow and arrow of great potency? Who would have made the bow, Aule himself? Earendil's battle with Ancalagon lasted a day and a night. The fighting must have covered a lot of territory, so that only the Valar and Maiar might have been able to see the final conflict. Earendil would have been a shining spot in the sky, but his opponent would have rained fire around him. The re-engineered Vingelot either had modulating multi-phasic shields or someone was looking out for Earendil. Nonetheless the mariner in the sky must have been hard-pressed on occasion. It couldn't have been a simple case of dragon-hunting for him. He had to guide the ship and figure out where Ancalagon would be attacking from next. Earendil's battle with Ancalagon had to be the mother of all dragon-hero fights, and words fail to describe adequately what can be glimpsed only by the imagination. But when Ancalagon fell and it became clear that all was lost, what happened to the remaining dragons? Did no more than two, a male and female, survive the final onslaught? And, if so, why didn't the dragons re-emerge in the Second Age? For that matter, what the heck is a cold-drake? The only mention of a cold-drake is a brief anecdote in Appendix A to The Lord of the Rings where Tolkien says that a Dwarven king and one of his sons are slain by a cold-drake in front of their hall. People have wondered through the years what the difference between a cold-drake and a regular dragon might be. Gaming systems tell us the cold-drake must be a dragon which breathes cold air, using frost as a breath weapon rather than fire. I'm not so sure Tolkien envisioned various breath weapons. The cold-drakes may simply have been dragons which didn't breathe fire. Although that may seem a bit of a let-down, dragons don't have to breathe fire in order to be terrifying and powerful. People have enough trouble rationalizing how Morgoth could have bred dragons and then winged dragons from non-winged dragons like Glaurung. Their massive size, their ability to just stare you in the eye and mesmerize you, their incredible strength -- these would be sufficient armaments for the typical hungry dragon. Tossing in frost-breathers, water dragons, and all the DnD variants trivializes Middle-earth's monsters. Tolkien's dragons were creatures you just didn't go messing around with. For example, no one ever seems to have killed the mysterious cold-drake.

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