This article contains spoilers for The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.High fantasy originator J.R.R. Tolkien penned The Hobbit, which inspired fantasy dragons for generations to come, but Tolkien also wrote about dragons in a few other stories set in Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy did a great job bringing this concept to life.

Tolkien's 1927 poem about Oliphaunts wasn't overtly set in Middle-earth, but it later formed the basis of a poem mentioned in Lord of the Rings. Aside from that debatable entry into the legendarium, The Hobbit was the first publication of The Lord of the Rings's world. The main villain of this work was a dragon, proving dragons' centrality to the lore of Tolkien's Middle-earth. But Tolkien had been drafting tales of Middle-earth and its dragons since 1914, and only after he ed away did his son publish this wider lore in the form of The Silmarillion and The History of Middle-earth.

4 Scatha

The Long-Worm

Éowyn was one of the best characters in The Lord of the Rings and in The Return of the King, she gave Merry a horn that "came from the hoard of Scatha the Worm." Éowyn commented that "Eorl the Young brought it from the north." She referred to an old Rohirrim king, alive between 2485 and 2545. In Eorl's time, the Rohirrim lived further north than the plains of Rohan of the late Third Age. This situated them near the Ered Mithrin, known as the Grey Mountains, a mountain range at the top of Rhovanion. This was Scatha's territory.

Scatha was one of the "long-worms" according to "Appendix A," but it's uncertain if these differed from the other "worms" (dragons).

Watchers of The Rings of Power may recognize Rhovanion as the territory of the Harfoots in Tolkien's Second Age. Tolkien backed up the show's location of the Harfoots in his prologue to The Lord of the Rings, and he also placed Scatha in that general vicinity, calling him "the great dragon of Ered Mithrin." Scatha's tale was more fully laid out in "Appendix A" of The Lord of the Rings but Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies never went into its detail. Ancient Rohirrim Fram slew Scatha, starting a feud with Dwarves over his hoard.

3 Glaurung

The First

Glaurung was the main villain of "Of Túrin Turambar," the twenty-first chapter of The Silmarillion. As such, he featured heavily in The Children of Húrin, which was an alternative version of Tolkien's Turambar story. Tolkien's son, Christopher, went back to the Turambar story after he published The Silmarillion and created this longer edit of his father's work. The resulting publication was a novel outlining the downfall of the heroic Húrin and Glaurung's slow and painful decimation of his children.

In 1914, Tolkien worked on a story about Kullervo, a doomed character in a Finnish epic published in 1835. He would later turn this into his story of Túrin Turambar. Tolkien wrote the first ever drafts concerning Middle-earth in 1914, also touching on Eärendil. That makes Glaurung's story part of Tolkien's first-ever imaginings of Lord of the Rings and its mythology. Glaurung put a spell on Túrin's sister, Nienor, to make her forget her past. Túrin didn't know her in her adulthood, so he fell in love with Nienor when they met. Needless to say, this ended in tragedy.

Glaurung also saw to the ruin of Nargothrond, which was the realm of the Elf Finrod Felagund. Finrod was Galadriel's brother, and this lesser-known Tolkien character had established one of the greatest realms of the First Age before Glaurung invaded it and took over. Glaurung was the first dragon that Morgoth created, and he took a long time to mature. As such, he was known as the Father of Dragons and may go down in Eldar lore as the worst and the most devastating of them.

2 Ancalagon

The Greatest

Ancalagon the Black was known as the greatest of Morgoth's dragons, and was winged, unlike Glaurung. While the flightless Glaurung represented Morgoth's first, tentative experiments in dragonkind, Ancalagon was Glaurung's lethal evolution. Both Glaurung and Ancalagon were confirmed in Tolkien's stories as fire-drakes. Fire-drakes were fire-breathing dragons known in the Elvish language of Quenya as Urulóki. Ancalagon fought on Morgoth's side in the War of Wrath, one of the great Wars of Beleriand.

Both fire-drakes and cold-drakes existed in Middle-earth, with an unnamed cold-drake slaying the Dwarves Dáin I and Frór.

The War of Wrath was so cataclysmic that it sunk most of the realm of Beleriand, ending the First Age and beginning the Second. Ancalagon and the unnamed dragons fighting with him had a big hand in this extensive destruction. This Great Worm was slain by Elrond's father, Eärendil the Mariner. Aided by the Great Eagles, Eärendil "slew Ancalagon... and cast him from the sky; and he fell upon the towers of Thangorodrim, and they were broken in his ruin." This First Age fire-drake has never been adapted for the screen, and neither has Glaurung, unlike Tolkien's most famous dragon.

1 Smaug

The Golden

Smaug the Golden is, of course, the antagonist of The Hobbit, finding central importance in the second movie in Jackson's Hobbit trilogy. Bilbo and the Company of Thorin took on Smaug in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, but it was Bard of Lake-town who finally killed the beast. Smaug's arrogance and intellect made him a whole new kind of dragon in the literary landscape of 1937, when The Hobbit was first published. Smaug exemplified a feature common to dragons in Middle-earth - the guarding and hoarding of wealth.

In The Lost Road and Other Writings, Tolkien wrote an essay on etymology that listed Gostir as a dragon name meaning dread glance, but no detail on any dragon of this name was given.

Flawlessly voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch in The Hobbit movies, Smaug was living amid a giant stash of treasure that he had claimed as his own. Dislodging Thorin's ancestors from their home in Erebor, Smaug took his place as the owner of the hoard, killing anyone who stood in his path. In The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf flagged to Frodo that "there is not now any dragon left on earth in which the old fire is hot enough [to melt the Rings of Power]." This implied that Smaug may be the best known dragon in Middle-earth, but he was not the last.