Were Dragons inherently "evil"?

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Originally Posted by Pervinca Took

Yes, that was the other bit of what Tolkien said about orcs - that they were sort of aware of good and bad but didn't often/ever act upon the 'good' instinct. I can't remember his exact words, or where they are from. Probably one of the Letters.

It's from his essay on Orcs published in Morgoth's Ring. Although it's expanded quite a bit by Shippey, who has a nice discussion of Shagrat and Gorbag, their recognition of "good" conduct and their failure ever to do it.

The nature of the fear or souls or whatever of Morgoth's creatures was always problematical for Tolkien, and the writings in MR showing him wrestling with ideas philosophically and theologically without reaching a firm conclusion. As a good Catholic he was very uncomfortable with the idea of "hereditary damnation," and tried out making the Orcs beasts or automatons rather than sentient, rational beings.

Dragons, once he decided that Morgoth didn't simply "make" them, he viewed as reptilian creatures presumably bred to monstrous size and then inhabited or possessed by "evil spirits" (which one supposes must be lesser Maiar of Melkor's following, junior Balrogs). But that would only apply, one would think, to those worms spawned in the Elder Days, not to their remote egg-hatched descendants, with regard to whom the same problems as with the Orcs arise.

Of course, from a literary perspective Tolkien viewed Dragons as very avatars of evil, or at least that aspect of evil manifested in greed, possessiveness and wanton destruction (the wily lawyerliness is a (brilliant) Tolkien invention). In Beowulf and the Volsung legend T regarded the dragons as manifestations of the Primeval Darkness, the wild black forest of savagery and chaos within which human life was just a small firelit hall.