Smaug and Saint George

 

    Do you notice any similarities between these two pictures? Well, you should, because Bard the Bowman and Saint George are both dragon slayers.

    The Bible actually contains a surprising amount of dragons. Revelation 20:2 describes how the Archangel Michale "seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil, or Satan, and bound him for a thousand years." Christ, himself, was depicted in the Late Antique and Medieval ages trampling on beasts, which often included a basilisk, serpent, or dragon. In fact, the idea of monsters and dragons was frequently seen in Medieval Christian Europe. Tolkien himself claims that "in England this imagination [monsters] was brought in touch with Christendom, and with the Scriptures" (Tolkien, The Monsters and The Critics). The most famous of these Anglo-Christian dragon-slayers, however, was Saint George.

    In the story of Saint George and the Dragon, Saint George is given the magic sword Ascalon, which is capable of slaying anything it touches, by an evil witch, who he ends up defeating through trickery. George then sets out to slay an evil dragon so that he might save the princess of Egypt and gain, through the promise of King Ptolemy of Egypt, her hand in marriage and the crown of Egypt.  He ends up slaying the dragon, marrying the princess, and inheriting the crown of Egypt.  Had he not returned to England with the princess George would have ended his story as a king.

    The story of Saint George is mirrored in Tolkien's story Farmer Giles of Ham, albeit in a more comical depiction. Farmer Giles also beats an initial enemy through trickery, even if it was unintentional, and receives the dragon-slaying sword Caudimordax, or Tailbiter. Giles then sets out to fight the dragon Chrysophylax and beats it into submissions. Giles then uses the dragon to secure his status as a king in his own kingdom. While this story could be interpreted as a parody of Beowulf the similarities to Saint George seem stronger, so for the sake of this argument I will assume that Giles is Tolkien's version of Saint George.

    Considering the comparison between Giles and George, are we then able to link Tolkien's dragons to other stories in the Christian tradition? If farmer Giles is Saint George, who then is Bard the Bowman? Well, he is the son of the Lord of Dale who was the only one who could slay the dragon, and it is he who leads the army of men into the final battle (in The Hobbit) against evil in the Battle of the Five Armies. This seems very similar to the story in Revelation of the Archangel Michael who is the son of the Lord of Heaven, who was tasked with slaying the dragon Satan, and it is he who leads the army of heaven in the final battle against evil. Does this then mean that Smaug is Satan?

    To answer this question, one must discover why Tolkien includes dragons in his stories. In The Monsters and The Critics, Tolkien attributes a special role to dragons as the great product of man's imagination claiming that "the dragon in legend is a potent creation of men's imagination, richer in significance than his barrow is in gold." For Tolkien, the dragon is the apex of a challenging foe, the hardest enemy that a hero can face, and "if the hero falls before a dragon, then certainly he should achieve his early glory by vanquishing a foe of similar order" (Tolkien, The Monsters and the Critics). The evolution of the hero to fighting a dragon is part of the reason why Tolkien holds the story of Beowulf in such high regard.

    The special role the dragon plays in a hero's story is why Tolkien gave unique names to many of his dragons (Chrysophylax, Smaug, Glaurung). The inclusion of unique names for these foes highlights the unique role they play in the story. The triumph of Bard seems greater when the line is: 

"Smaug shot spouting into the air, turned over and crashed down from on high in ruin" (Tolkien, The Hobbit),

rather than:

"the dragon shot spouting into the air, turned over and crashed down from on high in ruin."

    By naming the enemy, Tolkien has given gravitas to the accomplishment of Bard. The name "Smaug" carries with it the historical actions of Smaug, it reminds the reader of the destruction of Dale and The Lonely Mountain kingdom. If Smaug had just been "the dragon", the weight of his history would have been lost. The power of names has already been discussed in the realm of Tolkien, and combing that power with the narrative significance of dragons creates an immensely powerful foe for the heroes to combat.

    While I cannot say for sure, Tolkien's opinion of dragons as the greatest enemy, the best ones for the heroes to fight at the end of the story, seems to mirror the role of Satan in the Bible. Satan is the greatest evil in the Bible and the "final boss" in the narrative of the great fight against evil. Smaug holds the same role in The Hobbit, that Satan holds in the Bible, as the great evil that Bilbo and his group must defeat. The link between Bard and Michael has already been theorized, so it would make sense, if that were true, that Smaug must be Satan. Additionally, unlike most other dragons who Tolkien does not portray as evil, but rather just non-humanocentric, Smaug has the traits of greed and envy, two of the sins most prominent in Satan himself. Smaug, in this way, is special when compared to Tolkien's other dragons, and, therefore, I believe that Smaug is meant to be an allegory of Satan via how he is portrayed in The Hobbit.

Photo Sources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5haX0SXvk1Q; https://www.pc-freak.net/blog/why-saint-george-is-depicted-on-icons-killing-a-dragon-an-ancient-story-of-saint-george-killing-the-last-dragon-a-collection-of-7-icons-of-saint-martyr-george/; https://www.dreamstime.com/stock-images-icon-st-george-image29686514

-CG