J.R.R. Tolkien by Colin Duriez

Author:Colin Duriez [Duriez, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4463-5834-4
Publisher: F+W Media
Published: 2012-08-22T04:00:00+00:00

Gothmog, Lord of the Balrogs, riding a dragon.

Let there be dragons

J.R.R. Tolkien’s desire for monsters

As a child, J.R.R. Tolkien admitted: ‘I desired dragons…’ It was the retelling of the story of Sigurd slaying the dragon Fáfnir in Andrew Lang’s Red Fairy Book that truly fired his youthful imagination. At around the age of six or seven Tolkien wrote about a ‘green great dragon’. His mother told him that the correct order of saying this was ‘a great green dragon’, and years later, as an eminent Professor of English language at Oxford, he still couldn’t find a reason why this should be so. After his death, his adult retelling from Old Norse of Sigurd and Fáfnir, a story he had always loved, was eventually published.

Tolkien’s stories of Middle-earth over the Ages, leading up to the time of the destruction of Sauron’s Ring, reveal a kind of dragon lore or history. Morgoth, Tolkien’s Satan equivalent, probably bred dragons. In early Ages, dragons could not fly; even later, the dragons called cold-drakes apparently could not breathe out fire. Dragons were always, however, malevolent and capable of beguiling speech. Tolkien owed much to northern European imagination in his depiction of these beasts, including the way the scaly creatures greedily hoarded treasure. Early dragons participated in the fall of the hidden Elven city of Gondor; metal dragons that carried orcs and were built by Morgoth also took part in that great battle. One of the greatest and most feared dragons of the early Ages of Middle-earth was Glaurung, who was killed by Túrin Turambar in one of Tolkien’s best but unfinished stories, The Children of Húrin (2007).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.