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PotbellyHairyfoot
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Post Melkor's Minions- Dragons
on: July 13, 2007 03:20
What are dragons? Where did they come from? What do they want? What do they do for Melkor?
cirdaneth
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Post RE: Melkor's Minions- Dragons
on: July 14, 2007 10:48
The first thing about dragons is that they are mythical … so we don’t have to subject them to reality-testing and work out how they evolved wings while retaining four legs, or their power-to-weight ratio. (AAAAGH! Not the Balrog debate again!) :cry:

Perhaps we should just look at how Tolkien’s own dragon ideas evolved. His earliest ideas are in HoME II – Book of Lost Tales II in Christopher Tolkien’s Notes. Tolkien often used the old dragon names of 'drake' and 'worm'

Some had wings and some were flightless. Originally they were “cold-drakes” but Morgoth later bred fire into them. Glaurung was a flightless fire-drake, but the pinnacle of dragon-breeding was probably Smaug of The Hobbit, a classic, winged dragon. So there were four types eventually. The wingless cold-drakes may have been what we now know as snakes and lizards.
Figwit
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Post RE: Melkor's Minions- Dragons
on: July 15, 2007 09:27
In a meta-comment, I think it's very interesting to see that depending on the genre of the story, the dragons are different. Smaug for instance, who seems to be the most full-on dragon of them all, is featured in 'The Hobbit', a children's book. Whereas Glaurung appears in some of the gloomiest stories Tolkien ever wrote, and stories that are very close to capturing the atmosphere of the mythologies he was borrowing from. At the same time, Glaurung is a lot closer to the original northern European concept of a dragon.
PotbellyHairyfoot
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Post RE: Melkor's Minions- Dragons
on: December 10, 2007 12:55
We have now, through the eyes of Turin, seen Glaurung, The Father of all Dragons, close up.
What are his goals, and how does he achieve them?
What traits does he share in common with all of Melkor's minions?
Dolwen
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Post RE: Melkor's Minions- Dragons
on: December 12, 2007 06:50
Glaurung's goal is to gain riches for himself and to control the situation. He achieves his goal but putting a spell on anyone who looks in his eyes. As with all of Melkor's minions he is very greedy and takes great pleasure in doing evil and causing despair.
Ilandir
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Post RE: Melkor's Minions- Dragons
on: December 12, 2007 07:43
I think that aside from gathering treasure, he specifically lets Turin live which leads to further disruption on the good side (even though it was ultimately his undoing) ... but I think Glaurung's main tactic in harming the good side was to actually hypnotize the victims and let THEM (unknowingly) do the harm.
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