Make Room for Dragons

Nonetheless, one may entertain the strong impression that dragons were drifting away from the Dark Lords and assuming their own priorities by the end of the Third Age. In fact, after the Downfall of Sauron in the War of the Ring, dragons had to assume their own priorities. But what happened with the beasties in the Second Age? There are no dragons in Numenor, and they are not mentioned in the brief accounts of the War of the Elves and Sauron or the War of the Last Alliance of Elves and Men. If there were dragon stories for the Second Age, what would be their purpose, and who would be their heroes? In 1949 Tolkien wrote to Naomi Mitcheson, "I find 'dragons' a fascinating product of imagination. But I don't think the Beowulf one is frightfully good. But the whole problem of the 'intrusion' of the dragon into northern imagination and its transformation there is one I do not know enough about. Fafnir in the late Norse versions of the Sigurd story is better; and Smaug and his conversation obviously is in debt here." (Letter 122) He didn't view dragons as an innate part of northern myth, and it's true that dragons occur in the earlier Greek mythologies which probably had some influence on northern mythology. Dragons were old when men were young, so to speak. And the men of Middle-earth became young again in the Second Age. The western Edain, wizened by their brush with Angband in the First Age, sailed over Sea to become the Numenoreans, High Men. Edainic peoples who stayed behind in Middle-earth enjoyed a millennium of peace and prosperity, in which they neither achieved anything great nor fell into darkness. They would have forgotten all they once knew about the darkness of the world, unless their Elven and Dwarven friends reminded them of the great wars of old. So, is there room for dragons in the Second Age? The question beckons the imagination a bit hesitantly, because dragons are not only intrusive, they are disruptive. Glaurung led the way in turning the tide against the Eldar of Beleriand, and he destroyed Nargothrond. Smaug took out the Kingdom under the Mountain and Dale. When a dragon appears, heroes need to be close by and handy, or else all the world tumbles into darkness. Dragonkind could not have troubled the northern world of the Eldar and the Edain prior to the War of the

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