The book is named
The Hobbit: or There and Back Again. At last, within the story, the reader is finally
there. Right inside the Lonely Mountain amidst all the treasures and face-to-face with the dragon Smaug. One can’t get more
there.
The preceding chapter’s main purpose was to set up this meeting.
As a picture Tolkien provides his own superb illustration “Conversation with Smaug”. This is arguably the most garish of Tolkien’s illustrations and shows that
garish need not be bad. The contrast with Tolkien’s first illustration showing a beautiful and peaceful, sunlit “Hobbiton-across-the-Water” is perfect.
Seeing that Smaug is only pretending to be asleep, Bilbo steps back and blesses the luck of his ring. And then Tolkien writes the words, “Then Smaug spoke.”
The story has already presented talking giant eagles and talking giant spiders, so it is not a great surprise that this dragon should also speak. But Tolkien has kept it from the reader until now that the dragon can speak. And how he speaks! Smaug is an excellent talker and arguably more intelligent than anyone else in the tale save for Gandalf.
Smaug puts together everything that Bilbo has to say and mostly puts it together the right way. Smaug is no brute beast. Smaug’s intellect is as great as his physical power.
A talking dragon is not the norm for folklore dragons. The talking exception is the Norse dragon Fafnir, but Fafnir was in origin a man or some man-like being who changed himself into dragon shape. Tolkien was very impressed by Fafnir and also based his dragon Glorund/Glorung in his story of Túrin on Fafnir.
Tolkien specifically mentions that Bilbo “was in grievous danger of coming under the dragon-spell”. As far as I know this dragon-spell is Tolkien’s own invention, perhaps originally coming from the supposed terror which serpents lay on their prey so that the prey freezes and does not move.
Dragons appear almost universally in folklore, usually as giant serpents without legs or wings. Latin
draco and Greek
δράκων (
drákōn)means ‘dragon’ in this sense. The Roman dragon standards were serpentine wind-socks. The dragons of Classical tales are also legless serpents but are sometimes winged and sometimes fire-breathing.
It was medieval Europeans who added legs to dragon, sometimes also including wings and the ability to breathe fire. Medieval illustrations in bestiaries also often add legs and wings to various kinds of normal serpents. Possibly there was far back some connection with the Chinense dragons who have four legs and wings.
As Tolkien remarks in
Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, letter 122:
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 there.
Neither the dwarves nor Bilbo had ever thought of the difficulties of getting Bilbo’s share of the dragon treasure home. Smaug saw the difficulty immediately. Once again, stupid, stupid, stupid dwarves and stupid, stupid, stupid Bilbo.