Quote:
Originally Posted by Sauron the White
But the people of Laketown are looking up into the skies and they see a fire breathing dragon the size of a large building flying towards them at a very quick speed. And what is their reaction to this?
Quick - destroy the bridge.
For me, and I guess it just me, that does not even approach the level of believability that I need to suspend disbelief. It does not pass the smell test.
The answer to the problem has absolutely nothing to do with the problem.
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How could they defend themselves against Smaug? Apart from arrows (so they thought), there were only two things they could do: prepare as much water as possible (which they did) and make sure that the dragon at least can't land and cause even more damage. This has nothing to do with belief - it just makes plain sense. What else could they have done? What do you suggest instead?
The only other option is to flee. But as Rune has pointed out, they probably kept very little horses at Esgaroth, and you just can't escape from a flying, fire-breathing dragon on foot. Even if everybody would have run into a different direction, Smaug would have killed most of them by his fire. Within the town, the people had a limited ability to fight the fires, not so on the land.
Tolkien didn't provide us with a stat sheet about Smaug. We don't know his exact size, shape and weight, not his endurance or style of flying or landing. The people of Laketown, and the people who built Laketown and its bridges, probably knew a bit more about it. All we can do is deduce these things from the given text. From his death scene we know that his weight was great enough to crash through the city, yet presumably little enough to be able to walk through or over it. His style of flying apparently didn't allow him to slow down his flight and land like a bird on a twig. His armour was strong enough to allow him to land anywhere on the shore - he didn't have to care about how many trees he would mow down. I would say that the builders of Laketown had this in mind and built their town and bridges like this in order to have a chance of avoiding the fate of Dale (do we know how exactly Dale was destroyed? I don't have my book with me right now, and it could be interesting to check).