If fell beasts are basically pterosaurs corrupted by Morgoth or Sauron, does that mean dragons are literally corrupted dinosaurs?
If fell beasts are basically pterosaurs corrupted by Morgoth or Sauron, does that mean dragons are literally corrupted dinosaurs?
Tolkien dragons are just evil. Yeah he was pretty boring like that.
If dinosaurs and such existed in Arda they would have been savage monsters corrupted from "normal" animals(meaning ones that are mentioned in the bible) by Morgoth in the first darkness to begin with.
He deliberately made his dragons perfectly in line with real myths about dragons specifically to push back against romanticized friendly dragons that were becoming more and more common in literature until Smaug reminded nerds what dragons are supposed to be.
The dragons had little to no presence in fiction at that point before he published The Hobbit. It was I supposed too old-fashioned. If anything more varied and complex dragons came AFTER. Ursula Le Guin and that other author and looks like people liked it (my theory is that people were especially receptive to a less vilified depiction of dragons because of the dinosaur renaissance) and it's maybe the only depiction of a fictional species that differs from the way Tolkien envisioned. Elves, orcs, dwarves and halflings are pretty much the same with some varieties (the elves may be more arrogant or the orcs may be more like proud barbarians) .
What little presence dragons had were good dragons subverting the old mythological greedy hateful dragons, and Tolkien despised that just like Mr Tumnus
It's interesting then that Tolkien opted to give his dragon a lot of dialogue. Smaug being a bit of a chatterbox is probably the single most influential aspect of Tolkien's contribution to how dragons are depicted in fiction.
It's the only logical outcome of Tolkien's mythology. His dragons aren't morally monotonous for lack of imagination, but because he chose to.
No it means original orcs werefrom.elves but subsequent versions were also made from humans
What you need more? A long flashback showing how Smaug was abused by his grandmother as a youngling perhaps?
dragons aren't corrupted anything, they're just dragons
Wrong.
they were created by Morgoth in Angband while the elves were besieging it for centuries. He spent 500 years breeding lizards until he managed to make a super-intelligent fire breathing one. Glaurung didn't have wings though and was probably just descended from normal lizards unless he had some ancient dinosaurish monsters tucked away in Angband just like Sauron had the fell beasts tucked way up his sleeve until the end of the third age. It was already the years of the sun in the first age when he created dragons, not even 10,000 years before lord of the rings. There wouldn't have just been dinosaurs around.
Sure sweetie, go eat your tendies.
Dragons are the exception to the 'Morgoth lacked the power to create anything, he could only warp what was already created' line. Tolkien never describes how dragons are made, just that Morgoth made them, despite his own words claiming Morgoth couldn't make anything from scratch and dragons not being extant from the beginning of Creation like everything else (and that b***h Ungoliant). My pet headcanon is, like with Ungoliant, Glaurung was a remnant creation from one of Eru's previous frickups when universe-building that didn't get wiped over when he and the Valar sang the Arda universe into being, and Morgoth warped Glaurung into his service and derived the other dragons from him. No canon supports this, of course, but it's how I can reconcile it in my own skull.
>Tolkien never describes how dragons are made
same with orcs
We know what he made Orcs from. We know what he made Trolls from. We don't know what he made dragons from.
It also said he 'made' trolls and 'made' orcs and in all cases it's assumed he started with something already alive and fricked it up with his dark powers. There's no reason to think dragons are any exception just because it isn't explicitly stated what he corrupted them from. Some kind of reptile, no doubt.
but orcs kept being "bred" somehow, and AFAIK Tolkien never settled on an origin for them
According to Christopher Tolkien, he just kept waffling back and forth between them being corrupted elves or corrupted men. The corrupted elves version is what made it in to the Silmarillion, not directly stated, but orcs already exist by the time men have awoken so that's generally considered canon.
Smaug was moronic, he left his fricking treasure unguarded when he had the midgets literally trapped, and got killed out of pure hubris ,(and plot arrows)
Yes. Much like how white people are just corrupted black people.
Yakub was getting bullied like every IQ >80 black kid so made some frens and it went awry.
They're likely Maia crossed with giant snakes and or dinosaurs, think Loki having sex with the stallion to make Selpinir.
>It was a winged creature: if bird, then greater than all other birds, and it was naked, and neither quill nor feather did it bear, and its vast pinions were as webs of hide between horned fingers; and it stank. A creature of an older world maybe it was, whose kind, fingering in forgotten mountains cold beneath the Moon, outstayed their day, and in hideous eyrie bred this last untimely brood, apt to evil. And the Dark Lord took it, and nursed it with fell meats, until it grew beyond the measure of all other things that fly; and he gave it to his servant to be his steed
What the hell is a "fell meat" lol
meat pumped full of black magic to turn your pterodactyl in to a fantasy monster.
>fingering in forgotten mountains
What, exactly, did Tolkien mean by this?
lingering*
>until it grew beyond the measure of all other things that fly
fell beasts confirmed bigger than dragons.
>What the hell is a "fell meat" lol
Evil meat