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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sacrosanct" data-source="post: 9177694" data-attributes="member: 15700">That's some....speculation.  Why would Tolkien base Smaug off of Beowulf's dragon when a closer analogy would be Fafnir? I mean, scholars like Jonathan Evans come right out and says* Smaug was based off of Fafnir. Tolkien said he was inspired by Fafnir. Your entire assumption falls flat.Also, Naegling doesn't "accomplish nothing, more or less". It wounds the dragon twice (something no other weapon did to that point), and only breaks because Beowulf hits the dragon so hard with it.  And again, Hrunting was meant to fail against giants by a whole lot of people who have studied the poem. Not sure why you keep bringing that up when it's been addressed repeatedly, and does not take away from the fact that it was a weapon that guaranteed victory against everything else, and Beowulf still used an ancient powerful sword to kill Grendel's mother.Also, nothing in your comment disputes the fact that nearly all heroes in mythology and folklore rely on magical items to help them win against the big bad battles.*"The most important of Smaug’s antecedents was Fafnir, a treasure-hoarding dragon from a Norse epic. Tolkien first ran into Fafnir in a story-book when he was very young, writes literature scholar Jonathan Evans, and the dragon had a profound effect. “I desired dragons with a profound desire,” Tolkien later said. “Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighborhood. But the world that contained even the imagination of Fafnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever cost of peril.”Some of young Tolkien’s first attempts at storytelling, influenced by Fafnir, were about dragons, and the memory of Fafnir was realized in Smaug. Like Smaug, Fafnir has a giant hoard of gold that is his main preoccupation. He also talks, warning the hero Sigurd that taking his hoard of gold will result in trouble. “That same gold which I have owned shall be thy bane too,” Fafnir says."</blockquote>

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