Olgar Shiverstone
Legend
As species go, we dragons are terribly misunderstood. Despite the popular myth, dragons really aren’t all about the gold. Or the princesses, for that matter. Sure, I you can find the occasional tasty princess. You want to avoid the virgins. Most of them come in only two varieties: sickly sweet, or full of smug, and both make me sick to my stomach. But a lot of the non-virgin princesses tend to be rotten to the core – too much rich food? Or maybe evil stepmothers? You can’t tell until you bite into them, so I find it best to avoid them all entirely. Stick to horses, cattle, and sheep. They have a nice consistent flavor; must be all that bland grass.
Anyway, back to the gold. The yellowness is sickening, the shininess is blinding, and the clinking is maddening. In coin form, though, it does make a pretty good bed. First, because a good pile of them conforms pretty well to your body, so you can make a decent nest in them. Sure, when you’re a hatchling it’s easy enough to get a decent bed for a while from a couple of bear skins and a couple dozen sheep, but much past that first molt and the best you can do is a woolen pillow and you’re back to sleeping on the hard stony ground. Don’t talk to me about rushes, either – I’ve tried that, and all it takes is one sneeze while you’re sleeping and your entire bed goes up in smoke, and then you’re all sooty and back on the stone anyway.
Gold coins retain heat well, so that’s another plus. They soften a bit when you breathe on them, but don’t completely melt, so you end up with a nice cozy warm bed, and if you have enough you can even burrow under them. Some cold nights up in the Withered Heath I would have slaughtered a whole village for a warm blanket big enough to throw over me. Waking up once an hour to blow flame over your back to keep warm means you don’t get much sleep and wake up in the morning with a horrible sore throat and cough; never mind hibernating. Makes me wish I was one of those cold-blooded were-wyrms; they don’t have these problems. But I digress; I was talking about gold.
The most important thing about gold is this: it doesn’t tarnish. Little known fact about dragons: we sweat. It’s what keeps our scales nice and shiny. It also has the unfortunate side effect of reacting with a lot of other materials. Too acidic, I think – it breaks down nice furs, and with things like steel, copper, or silver, the tarnishing produces some side effect that becomes a major irritant. Imagine getting a sunburn under your scales, and having to lie on it for hour after hour. It’s excruciating, and explains why dragons who build beds from silver or copper coins (which, let’s face it, are more attractive to start with) are always so bad-tempered.
So that’s it: gold is handy for a nice comfy bed, and not much else. Now I probably shouldn’t understate the value of a comfortable place to sleep; when you’re nigh-immortal, and have such a slow metabolism that having a half-dozen cattle for a snack causes you to take a three-month nap, you need a comfortable bed if you’re not going to wake up tired, sore, and generally cranky. You don’t need much more than enough to roll around in, though; any moderate-size hoard will do for even the largest of us. Any more than that and you start attracting attention.
That’s the real problem with gold: too much of it and you’re constantly bothered. Not so much by heroes – they tend to be uptight about murdering villages and eating princesses and stuff like that, and as I’ve mentioned I tend to try to avoid those things. Besides, those avenging heroes tend to be a bit dull – not surprising given that they’ve usually been hired by a bunch of dullards whose solution to get a dragon to stop eating the occasional stray cow or sheep is to stake out some poor local girl as a sacrifice, and then get a fit of conscience about that and decide that the slippery slope down to murder would be a fun ride. Heroes tend to come alone, with a nasty big axe or sword and a bunch of heavy metal armor, so they are loud, slow, and prone to heat stroke. One breath and they tend to expire pretty quickly.
I’m not bothered by heroes.
Adventuring parties are another thing. They used to be a real threat, because they bring a bunch of tools and skills honed over year of wandering from place to place seeking excitement and treasure as itinerant murder-hoboes. A sharp sword by itself is one thing; when combined with a couple of archers, some sneak in the shadows with a throwing dagger and a cloak of invisibility, and a wizard to keep the flames at bay, suddenly an adventuring party is a real threat to a dragon. I lost a lot of my best friends to adventurers, the bastards. Murdering innocent dragons for the contents of their mattresses – there’s no justice in Middle Earth, I tell you.
Luckily, adventuring parties as a cause of death has been on a steep decline. This is a controversial opinion, but I’m going to put it out there – the one positive to come out of Morgoth and Sauron and that lot running around and making war on everything is that elves and wizards have gotten scarce, and so well-equipped adventuring parties have become even more rare. With the exception of one decent wizard whom I know – good riddance. Sure, Sauron’s orcs have made a right mess of Middle Earth and no sane dragon wants those smelly things nearby – we’ll save a discussion of that nutter Ancalagon for another time, thank you very much – but you can’t deny that we haven’t benefitted from that one side effect.
No, the attention I’ll complain about is those greedy, stone-dwelling, money-grubbing pests: dwarves. Once they hear you have a little bit of comfort, the hairy tunnel rats won’t leave you alone. Dwarves have a cultural failing: they think that everything a dwarf touches, digs out of the ground, even if given away or traded, belongs to them, in perpetuity. If a dwarf’s many-times great grandfather drops a copper penny, and someone else picks it up, his descendants will swear a blood feud and won’t be satisfied until it is returned, no matter how many generations pass and how many of them die in the process. Dwarves must nourish themselves on the bile of eternal hatred; it’s the only thing that explains their inability to let go of their desire to be revenged while acquiring everything in sight. Have a bit of honestly obtained dwarf handiwork and they just keep coming until they get it back, no matter how high the corpses get piled.
That’s what’s ultimately at the root of how this whole Lonely Mountain business started…
An extract from The Liberation of Dale: Interviews with Smaug the Magnificent.
Anyway, back to the gold. The yellowness is sickening, the shininess is blinding, and the clinking is maddening. In coin form, though, it does make a pretty good bed. First, because a good pile of them conforms pretty well to your body, so you can make a decent nest in them. Sure, when you’re a hatchling it’s easy enough to get a decent bed for a while from a couple of bear skins and a couple dozen sheep, but much past that first molt and the best you can do is a woolen pillow and you’re back to sleeping on the hard stony ground. Don’t talk to me about rushes, either – I’ve tried that, and all it takes is one sneeze while you’re sleeping and your entire bed goes up in smoke, and then you’re all sooty and back on the stone anyway.
Gold coins retain heat well, so that’s another plus. They soften a bit when you breathe on them, but don’t completely melt, so you end up with a nice cozy warm bed, and if you have enough you can even burrow under them. Some cold nights up in the Withered Heath I would have slaughtered a whole village for a warm blanket big enough to throw over me. Waking up once an hour to blow flame over your back to keep warm means you don’t get much sleep and wake up in the morning with a horrible sore throat and cough; never mind hibernating. Makes me wish I was one of those cold-blooded were-wyrms; they don’t have these problems. But I digress; I was talking about gold.
The most important thing about gold is this: it doesn’t tarnish. Little known fact about dragons: we sweat. It’s what keeps our scales nice and shiny. It also has the unfortunate side effect of reacting with a lot of other materials. Too acidic, I think – it breaks down nice furs, and with things like steel, copper, or silver, the tarnishing produces some side effect that becomes a major irritant. Imagine getting a sunburn under your scales, and having to lie on it for hour after hour. It’s excruciating, and explains why dragons who build beds from silver or copper coins (which, let’s face it, are more attractive to start with) are always so bad-tempered.
So that’s it: gold is handy for a nice comfy bed, and not much else. Now I probably shouldn’t understate the value of a comfortable place to sleep; when you’re nigh-immortal, and have such a slow metabolism that having a half-dozen cattle for a snack causes you to take a three-month nap, you need a comfortable bed if you’re not going to wake up tired, sore, and generally cranky. You don’t need much more than enough to roll around in, though; any moderate-size hoard will do for even the largest of us. Any more than that and you start attracting attention.
That’s the real problem with gold: too much of it and you’re constantly bothered. Not so much by heroes – they tend to be uptight about murdering villages and eating princesses and stuff like that, and as I’ve mentioned I tend to try to avoid those things. Besides, those avenging heroes tend to be a bit dull – not surprising given that they’ve usually been hired by a bunch of dullards whose solution to get a dragon to stop eating the occasional stray cow or sheep is to stake out some poor local girl as a sacrifice, and then get a fit of conscience about that and decide that the slippery slope down to murder would be a fun ride. Heroes tend to come alone, with a nasty big axe or sword and a bunch of heavy metal armor, so they are loud, slow, and prone to heat stroke. One breath and they tend to expire pretty quickly.
I’m not bothered by heroes.
Adventuring parties are another thing. They used to be a real threat, because they bring a bunch of tools and skills honed over year of wandering from place to place seeking excitement and treasure as itinerant murder-hoboes. A sharp sword by itself is one thing; when combined with a couple of archers, some sneak in the shadows with a throwing dagger and a cloak of invisibility, and a wizard to keep the flames at bay, suddenly an adventuring party is a real threat to a dragon. I lost a lot of my best friends to adventurers, the bastards. Murdering innocent dragons for the contents of their mattresses – there’s no justice in Middle Earth, I tell you.
Luckily, adventuring parties as a cause of death has been on a steep decline. This is a controversial opinion, but I’m going to put it out there – the one positive to come out of Morgoth and Sauron and that lot running around and making war on everything is that elves and wizards have gotten scarce, and so well-equipped adventuring parties have become even more rare. With the exception of one decent wizard whom I know – good riddance. Sure, Sauron’s orcs have made a right mess of Middle Earth and no sane dragon wants those smelly things nearby – we’ll save a discussion of that nutter Ancalagon for another time, thank you very much – but you can’t deny that we haven’t benefitted from that one side effect.
No, the attention I’ll complain about is those greedy, stone-dwelling, money-grubbing pests: dwarves. Once they hear you have a little bit of comfort, the hairy tunnel rats won’t leave you alone. Dwarves have a cultural failing: they think that everything a dwarf touches, digs out of the ground, even if given away or traded, belongs to them, in perpetuity. If a dwarf’s many-times great grandfather drops a copper penny, and someone else picks it up, his descendants will swear a blood feud and won’t be satisfied until it is returned, no matter how many generations pass and how many of them die in the process. Dwarves must nourish themselves on the bile of eternal hatred; it’s the only thing that explains their inability to let go of their desire to be revenged while acquiring everything in sight. Have a bit of honestly obtained dwarf handiwork and they just keep coming until they get it back, no matter how high the corpses get piled.
That’s what’s ultimately at the root of how this whole Lonely Mountain business started…
An extract from The Liberation of Dale: Interviews with Smaug the Magnificent.
