GLAURUNG, “FATHER OF DRAGONS”

Glaurung, the Father of Dragons

J. R. R. Tolkien allows the full force of Morgoth’s evil genius to be revealed in the appearance of Glaurung, the Father of Dragons. Glaurung is the first and greatest of the Urulóki, or fire-breathing Dragons, of Middle-earth. This mighty serpent is of massive size and strength, and protected by scales of impenetrable iron. His fangs and claws are rapier-sharp and his great tail can crush the shield-wall of any army. And Glaurung, like all of Tolkien’s creatures, is rooted in ancient literature and language. His Dragons, in particular, come from some place very ancient and very evil – a place akin to the brutal and primitive world revealed in the earliest Old German epics, which do not record one happy ending.

Nonetheless, within this shadowy world of guaranteed tragic endings, Tolkien began to cast about for a dragon appropriate to the setting of Morgoth’s evil kingdom of Angband. Tolkien required something that was brutal, murderous and filled with low cunning. He wanted something that wallowed in the pleasures of torture of mind, body and spirit. Tolkien knew exactly what he wanted and where to find it: the embodiment of something akin to the most evil of all monsters created by the collective imagination of the Germanic and Norse peoples.

Few would disagree with Tolkien when it came to his choice of dragons (and his inspiration for Glaurung): “best of all [was] the nameless North of Sigurd of the Völsungs, and the prince of all dragons”. This “prince of all dragons” was the spectacularly patricidal, fratricidal, genocidal – and deeply unpleasant – Fáfnir the fire-drake, the usurper of the cursed golden treasure of the (mysterious and extinct) Nibelungs.

In Tolkien’s creation of Glaurung, we have a match in evil with Fáfnir. For beyond dragon-fire and serpent-strength, Glaurung has more subtle powers: the keenest eyesight, the greatest sense of hearing and smell. He is a serpent of great cunning and cleverness, but his intelligence – like that of all his race in Norse and Germanic legends – has the flaws of vanity, gluttony, greed and deceit. Indeed, all of Tolkien’s Dragons are – like their mythical ancestors – the embodiment of the chief evils of Elves, Men and Dwarves, and so are resolute in their destruction of those races. Tolkien acknowledged that he first encountered Fáfnir as a child, in Andrew Lang’s The Red Fairy Book (1890). This included “The Story of Sigurd”, a condensed version of William Morris and Eiríkur Magnússon’s translation of the Old Norse Völsunga saga, a tale that would fuel his imagination for the rest of his life. This early enthusiasm not only led to his study of Norse and Germanic literature and language – the focus of his life as a scholar – but also inspired his first serious attempt, aged 22, as the creator of his own original stories.

Fáfnir, Tolkien’s “Prince of All Dragons”

Those early compositions – drafted long before a glimmer of a Hobbit or a Ring Lord entered his mind – resulted in Tolkien’s creation of his own full-blooded, fire-breathing monster. The life and death of Glaurung the Deceiver is the tale of a powerful and original character central to The Silmarillion posthumously published some 60 years later. It is a tale very much inspired by the Völsunga saga; however, in many ways the portrayal and characterization of this Father of Dragons is much more nuanced and complex than his ancient model.

In Tolkien’s tale, the Dragon-slayer is Túrin Turambar, who in many aspects of his life resembles the cursed hero Kullervo from the Finnish epic The Kalevala. However, most obviously, Túrin shares many of the characteristics and adventures of Sigurd, the Norse hero of the Völsunga saga. Their guile and battle tactics are certainly comparable. For just as Túrin plunged his sword Gurthang into Glaurung’s soft underbelly in the slaying of the “Father of Dragons”, so Sigurd plunged his sword Gram into Fáfnir’s soft underbelly in the slaying of the “Prince of All Dragons”.