In the late Third Age, the dragons bred in the Northern Waste and Withered Heath north of the Grey Mountains. The first winged dragons were coeval with Ancalagon the Black. As in the later conception of the dragons in the Legendarium, the winged dragons had not yet been devised by Morgoth at the time of the Fall of Gondolin. These do not appear in the published Silmarillion, edited by Christopher Tolkien, in which real dragons attack the city. In the earliest drafts of " The Fall of Gondolin", the Lost Tale that is the basis for The Silmarillion, Morgoth (here called Melkor) sends mechanical war-machines in the form of dragons against the city some serve as transport for Orcs. Like the Old Norse dragon Fafnir, they are able to speak, and can be subtle of speech. Tolkien named four dragons in his Middle-earth writings. As well as "dragon", Tolkien called them "drake" (from Old English draca, in turn from Latin draco and Greek δράκων), and "worm" (from Old English wyrm, "serpent", "dragon"). Tolkien had been fascinated with dragons since childhood. ĭragons are already present in The Book of Lost Tales.
Smaug resembles Fafnir in several respects. Wood-carving in Hylestad Stave Church, 12th–13th century.
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