[Aiwendil]

Estelyn wrote:

But why did the man who "desired dragons" not include any in his greatest work?

This is a very interesting observation.

As you note, Tolkien did of course write stories about dragons. There are five named dragons in his works: Glaurung and Ancalagon in the Silmarillion, Smaug in The Hobbit, Scatha in the appendices to The Lord of the Rings, and Chrysophylax in Farmer Giles of Ham. Of these, Scatha and (to a lesser extent) Ancalagon are lacking in personality, being involved only in tales told with tremendous narrative distance. Chrysophylax is a bit comical - but he is a proper dragon and he does exude the dragon nature, as you might call it.

But Glaurung and Smaug are Tolkien's important dragons, the ones that are closely drawn and caught up in great tales. And both were firmly established characters by 1937. I think that this mundane fact may shoulder a large part of the responsibility for the absence of dragons in LotR - the fact is that LotR is a sequel to The Hobbit, and The Hobbit was a story about a dragon. Think how the fans complain about Lucas's re-use of the Death Star in Return of the Jedi. Tolkien himself noted (in a letter, I believe, though I don't have my copy of the book at hand) that he had not intended a sequel, and so had used up all his best ideas and motifs in The Hobbit and now had to come up with new ones.

Also, I think there is a tendency for a dragon to dominate any story. It would be hard (for someone like Tolkien, anyway) to write a story with a dragon in it that was not about the dragon. Chrysophylax, Smaug, and Glaurung each play a starring role in their respective tales.

I realize that all this is going a bit off topic, but I say it because I do not think it would be particularly advisable to seek some deeper meaning in the absence of dragons in LotR. It's tempting to say, for instance, that the absence of dragons marks LotR as more a work of "pseudo-historical fiction" than of "fantasy". But I think that the fact of the matter is simply that Tolkien had just told a story about dragons, and now he was telling a different one.

Lalwende wrote:

I loved the comments from Tolkien on the desire to see a dragon. I wonder how many 'Downers collected dinosaur models as children

I certainly did. But it's worth noting that there are differences as well as similarities between the fascination with dinosaurs and the fascination with dragons. They seem to spring from the same source, it's true. But fascination with dinosaurs is fascination with real creatures that did in fact once exist; it's ultimately a fascination with science. Fascination with dragons is fascination with a thing fundamentally of human invention and thoroughly fantastic. I say this not with the intent to disparage either, but as one who is and has always been fascinated with both.

I think there is a related distinction, by the way, between science fiction and fantasy. I don't see science fiction as watered down fantasy, or fantasy that doesn't have the guts to admit it's surrealism. Rather, science fiction is like the fascination with dinosaurs - fascination with the extraordinary but real; fantasy is fascination with dragons - pure invention.

I think that if a fascination with dragons is indeed in some way "subversive", then that subversion must consist in the fact that dragons are imaginary. There is a longing, which has its expression in good fantasy, for a thing that does not and has never existed. There is most definitely something subversive in that, if only on a psychological level. For all our lives, each of us is being told to be realistic, to deal with the real, pragmatic world and not with dragons. Society by its very nature must, to some extent, put pressure on each of its members to be attentive to and responsive to the external world (that which is beyond one's control) rather than the internal (where the dragons really are).

On the literary level, this is manifested in the obsession among modern literary critics with literature that deals with reality, that is useful or pragmatic. Fantasy, on the surface anyway, eschews the pragmatic - it even goes so far as to remove itself from the world of "real" concerns altogether. Tolkien was subversive, then, in a literary sense because he wasn't interested in that which the literary establishment was interested in; he did not conform to their obsession with realism.