DRAGONS IN THE WEST, by Daniel Ogden

So, been reading this book, Dragons in the West (Oxford UP, 2021), and there's a pretty interesting Tolkien reference in there -- as you might imagine, perhaps, considering the book's subject. 

Anyway, Ogden is basically writing a culture history of western dragons, though actually more "encyclopedia" than "history," and there's been a couple of distinct dragon permutations. In the Classical world, for examples, dragons (Gr. drakon; Lat. draco) were almost entirely giant snakes with preternatural abilities or roles. Then the artwork in the early Christian era started conflating dragons with sea monsters, which gave dragons their animalian heads and bulbous bodies. For legs and wings, though, we had to wait for dragons to start being conflated with demons and the Devil. By the 9th century AD, the dragons is a wyvern-creature and basically set, though the Western world needed until the turn of the 15th century to make them four-footed creatures permanently. But it's actually the Christian tradition that's largely responsible for modern dragons.

Back to Tolkien. Well, I'm reading the section on Germanic dragons, and Ogden is mentioning Saxo Grammaticus's Gesta Danorum, where the hero Frothi (Frode) confronts a treasure-sitting-on type of wingless dragon with a three-forked tongue, and he kills it. As Ogden mentions in an aside,

For all its vermiform configuration this dragon -- which Frothi kills after learning of a single vulnerable spot in its belly -- perhaps constitutes Tolkien's most immediate model for Smaug in The Hobbit, although the name of its antagonist, evidently the prototype of 'Frodo,' is deferred to The Lord of the Rings. (313)

I'm too lazy to look this up, but the derivation of Frodo's name is almost certainly wrong, I'm thinking. Tolkien went through a lot of variations on that, including Bingo and Bungo, but anyway .... there's a Froda that occurs in Beowulf, of which Saxo's Frothi is probably derivative. (That's according to wikipedia quoting Tom Shippey, but again, I'm too lazy atm to look it up.)

I'm also skeptical that Saxo was Tolkien's immediate source for the Smaug killing, too, because as Ogden mentions later on, Wiglaf kills the Firedrake in the belly in Beowulf, and Sigurd also attacks Fafnir's vulnerable belly (it is implied) in the Volsunga Saga (Ogden 362). So there's other sources of dragon vulnerability with which Tolkien would have been familiar. So, meh .... source studies.

But Ogden's book is still pretty cool. When speaking of Germanic dragons, for example, he distinguishes between ormr ("worm"; Anglo-Saxon wyrm; Middle High German wurm) and dreki (A.S. draca; M.H.G. drache/trache). That latter obviously derives from the Latin draco, which is showing Christian influence.

So Ogden posits that German dragons originally began as snake-like creatures, just like in the Classical world, and the wyvern-esque dragons were later merged onto that tradition. Some sources, as he shows, distinguish carefully between the two types, but others explicitly conflate them. 

This explains some oddities about how dragons appear in the literature, though. In Beowulf, the firedrake clearly flies to burn some villages ... but doesn't use flight in its fight against Beowulf, so we "get the impression that the dragon of this battle had long been a pure vermiform in its tradition, and that its substitution with a flying and presumably winged dragon has been somewhat cosmetic" (323). He also suspects that Fafnir is a "dragon stranded between paradigms: he can be given wings and other embellishments in direct description, surely enough, but the force of tradition behind his story keeps him cleaving closely to the ground" (325).