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Originally Posted by Nerwen
I don't think there is one... and it wouldn't be the first time that a wiki editor has been, let us say, a trifle over-imaginative.  |
I think the encyclopedia of Arda hit it on the head:
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Though Tolkien gives almost no clues about long-worms in the text of The Lord of the Rings, his illustrations of dragons give us some further hints. Tolkien's dragons tend to be sinuous, serpentine creatures, having the appearance almost of a winged snake rather than the more traditional dragon-form. This would explain the term 'long-worm' easily. It's interesting to note that Tolkien gave this form to another northern dragon, Smaug, which strongly suggests that he, too, was one of the long-worms.
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There is absolutely no indication that Scatha, or any Tolkien dragon, had two legs (as a 'long-worm' would be rather ungainly with two legs). I think some pseudo-scholars naturally link Tolkien to 'wyverns' based on the Anglo-saxon etymology of the word (A-S 'wivere', which means 'serpent', related to the French 'vouivre', both linked to the term 'viper'). Wyverns are supposedly two-legged and winged. The wyvern was a symbol of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex, and is the symbol of the Dragon School in Oxford. So the wyvern is linked to Tolkien by incidental association, although Tolkien never showed any affinity for that type of dragon. At least, not that I can recall.