The Fate of Smaug (art)

 

 

This picture contains an element from the American Museum of Natural History.

Old Dragon-Spells

The young have so little patience for the old, sometimes, and scorn the slow and the frail.  Yet in some ways, age brings a kind of power.  Lafcadio Hearn, a notable folklorist of the early twentieth century who lived in Japan, wrote about the ways that ghosts and biological memory – the oldest remnants of humanity, as it were – shape the course of human destiny.  In Elizabeth Bisland’s collection, The Japanese Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, he argues, “The race feeling is the most powerful of all impulses; stir it deeply, – and to the living the value of life and fame and love and all else disappear like smoke; and the dead become the masters; and the living only instruments.”

Smaug is no ghost, but a vast incarnation of physical energy.  His power, though, lies not just in his body, but also in his mind and his magic.  Bilbo finds this out as he tries to hide from the beast.  “Whenever Smaug’s roving eye, seeking for him in the shadows, flashed across him, he trembled, and an unaccountable desire seized hold of him to rush out and reveal himself and tell all the truth to Smaug.  In fact he was in grievous danger of coming under the dragon-spell.” 

 

The young may hold vitality, but the old and the dragons have truth in their bones.  And, in fact, Smaug’s power may have only increased with age.  He boasts, “I laid low the warriors of old and their like is not in the world today.  Then I was but young and tender.  Now I am old and strong, strong, strong…” 

When faced with the old that are strong, with their wisdom and cunning and magnificence, it may be that the young, the naïve, the innocent, will look on with wonder and tremble… for the old dragons are still casting their spells.

Image: Arthur Rackham

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Siegfried_and_the_Twilight_of_the_Gods_p_022.jpg

“The Splendor, the Lust, the Glory”

“The glow of Smaug!”

The theme of greed returns when Bilbo enters the lair of the dragon.  Tolkien’s writing here is particularly strong: “There he lay, a vast red-golden dragon, fast asleep; a thrumming came from his jaws and nostrils, and wisps of smoke, but his fires were low in slumber.  Beneath him… lay countless piles of precious things, gold wrought and unwrought, gems and jewels, and silver red-stained in the ruddy light.”  Upon actually seeing such wealth, “the splendor, the lust, the glory” began to affect the hobbit.

 

After the plucky hobbit manages to steal – or reclaim – a cup, Smaug’s “rage passes description – the sort of rage that is only seen when rich folk that have more than they can enjoy suddenly lose something that they have long had but have never before used or wanted.”

Is Smaug truly, as Bilbo calls him, “the Chiefest and Greatest of Calamities”?  At least dragons can be slain with an arrow.  What about the calamities that we make together?

 

Image: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Dragons of the Market

“There was a most specially greedy, strong and wicked worm called Smaug.”

The dragons of Middle-earth are not just powerful forces of nature – but rather intelligent, calculating creatures.  According to Thorin, “they hardly know a good bit of work from a bad, though they usually have a good notion of the current market value.”  Dragons are, as it were, creatures of the market, though especially brutal ones.  They are also parasites, since “they can’t make a thing for themselves, not even mend a loose scale of their armour.”

Gandalf laments the absence of heroes to fight the dragon: “Swords in these parts are mostly blunt, and axes are used for trees, and shields as cradles or dish-covers; and dragons are comfortably far-off (and therefore legendary).”  Yet Bilbo is able to imagine “plundering dragons settling on his quiet Hill and kindling it all to flames.”

 

 

In our world, there may not be dragons – but there are cold, calculating things, greedy, brutal, and cruel.  Let us hope that there are also heroes and wizards enough to defend us from them – or that we find, in ourselves, some forgotten heroism and wizardry.

Image: My photography mixed with art by Arthur Rackham

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:04_rackham_poe_decoration.jpg

 

Note: The use of the Atlas statue is not intended as commentary upon Rockefeller Center or its affiliates.  It just looked interesting.  The statue is, however – curiously enough – associated with Ayn Rand…

 

The Mountain Smoked (art)

Image: Includes elements from The American Museum of Natural History and the photography of Julia Margaret Cameron.