What happened to the Dragons???

[alatar]

Well, there was Smaug in the Third Age, but due to Gandalf's machinations, he's taken off the board before the War starts. Unless I'm forgetting something, no dragons were used by Sauron in either Third Age battle (beginning or end). You'd think that if they were available, Sauron would have used them somehow.

So maybe they became extinct.

[Andsigil]

Oh, there were still dragons around.

Remember that in 1958 Tolkien wrote that there was a 6000 year gap between the fall of Barad Dur and the beginning of recorded history:

Although we have no records of the later Fourth, or any following Age, Tolkien makes a brief allusion to the future of Middle-earth in a letter written in 1958: "I imagine the gap [between the Fall of Barad-dûr and modern times] to be about 6000 years; that is we are now at the end of the Fifth Age, if the Ages were of about the same length as S[econd] A[ge] and T[hird] A[ge]. But they have, I think, quickened; and I imagine we are actually at the end of the Sixth Age, or in the Seventh."

This note is especially interesting, as it gives some ground for bringing Tolkien's dating system up to date. The fact that we are 'at the end of the Sixth Age, or in the Seventh' hints strongly that Tolkien saw some important historical event as marking the recent (or imminent) end of the Sixth Age. Each of the three Ages we know about ended with a great war and the fall of a tyrant, and Tolkien was writing just thirteen years after the end of the Second World War: could there be a connection?

While this is circumstantial at best, it does seem to hint that perhaps the Downfall of the Third Reich was to the Sixth Age what the Downfall of Barad-dûr was to the Third. If so, we can 'reset' the calendar in 1945, which would be the first year of the Seventh Age. The letter quoted above, then, would have been written in VII 14, which explains Tolkien's reference to the change of Age, while the year 2000 would be VII 56.

So, dragons may well have been around in the mid-Fifth Age before finally being hunted into extinction:

Beowulf


Siegfried and Fafnir


St. George

[Mithalwen]

And not just "lumping great fairytale dragons but a small trim heraldic welsh dragon..."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5ZMNyscPcg (3min50)

or clerical grade ice dragons...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72Z8yyNRiyM

[alatar]

Oh, so *that's* what happened to all of the dragons! It would explain the phenom of Barney as well...

But me thinks that these aren't Melkor's dragons. Could they have died in a battle with the Entwives? That would explain why both no longer are seen.

[Mnemosyne]

Originally Posted by alatar

Could they have died in a battle with the Entwives? That would explain why both no longer are seen.

Only as long as the Blue Wizards get to help out. ^_^

[alatar]

Now this might be deserving of its own thread, but why exactly was the Green Dragon named as such? No hobbits, save Bilbo, ever saw a dragon and lived to make a living by it. Where did the idea come from then?

Prancing Ponies and Floating Logs I understand, but dragons?

[mark12_30]

Musta been named by one o' them Tooks.

[Inziladun]

Originally Posted by alatar

Now this might be deserving of its own thread, but why exactly was the Green Dragon named as such? No hobbits, save Bilbo, ever saw a dragon and lived to make a living by it. Where did the idea come from then?

Prancing Ponies and Floating Logs I understand, but dragons?

The Hobbits would have had legends of dragons from the time of their dwelling in Wilderland before they crossed the Misty Mountains. That wasn't all that far from the Withered Heath. Bilbo didn't need Gandalf or any of the Dwarves to tell him Smaug was anything but a dragon. He knew what that meant, so presumably other Hobbits retained some lore of dragons, though it had likely passed into myth by that point.
The founder of The Green Dragon, having never faced a live dragon himself, may have thought the name whimsical, something that would set his place apart from the 'Logs', 'Perches', and 'Bushes' in the area.

[Mithalwen]

Originally Posted by alatar

Oh, so *that's* what happened to all of the dragons! It would explain the phenom of Barney as well...

Erm isn't the ghastly Barney a dinosaur? Even a member of the "I love children but couldn't eat a whole one" school, like me, wonders at the mindset that thinks a T-rex is a good idea for a cuddly children's character....

It is a fairly common pub name, maybe it had a fearsome landlady.