Why do dragons hoard treasure

You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly. You should upgrade or use an alternative browser. Why do dragons like, hoard and guard gold? Thread starter esrbl Start date Apr 8, Tags dragons hobbit.

Erestor Arcamen Archivist Staff member. I actually found this on the lotr subreddit : In Greek myth dragons were set by the gods to guard golden treasures. The reason being that dragons were the most fearsome monster and would deter would-be thieves. The two most famous examples are the Dragon of the Golden Fleece in the sacred grove of the god Ares , and the Dragon of the Golden Apples in the sacred grove of the Hesperides.

In Greek drakon the source for our word dragon means " the watcher " from drakein the Greek verb meaning to stare. In Greek legends dragons were also described living in the mountains of India where they guarded the sources of gold. Sometimes instead of dragons, the guardians were griffins or giant ants. But in every case, the creature simply represented something which was fearsome and made acquisition of the riches difficult. Click to expand Olorgando not from 'Straya.

Somewhere here there's a thread where I brought up derkomai, the transfixing stare of the dragon , most evident in Glaurung though apparent in Smaug also , of which drakon seems to be a derivative. Erestor's quote raises a question in my mind about the origins of the ancient connection of gold and dragons : besides sight, which we know the Greeks considered an active, rather than passive, function, derkomai also meant "flash" or "gleam", terms long associated with gold; indeed, throughout the history of myth and literature, the "flash and gleam" of gold has attracted, even transfixed, the eyes of countless heroes and villains.

I wonder if that might be what connected the two in the minds of the ancients? Elthir Active Member. Great answers! I was going to say 'cause Dragons are cool. Elthir said:. Of course dragons are cool! Yeah, Man -- 'cause they like, hoard gold 'n stuff! And wicked cool in Boston MA. But back to the topic: technically Gwaihir should be spelled Gwaehir, but as even Tolkien used the former.

Guys, I am unable to follow " Sindarin vs. Quenya " discussions, or whatever trend some threads here seem to be drifting into …. Squint-eyed Southerner said:. Don't remind me! Though Smaug is mentioned as being especially greedy, there are at least two other specific examples of dragons hoarding treasure Glaurung and Scatha , as well as a vague mention that many dwarvish halls in the Grey Mountains had been attacked by dragons seeking treasure.

Dragons steal gold and jewels, you know, from men and elves and dwarves, wherever they can find them; and they guard their plunder as long as they live which is practically forever, unless they are killed , and never enjoy a brass ring of it.

Thorin makes some good points. It actually serves a purpose for him; the gleam attracts fish, who fall into his lair for him to eat. The treasure includes Maui's magic fishhook not because it's shiny, but as retribution for Maui taking one of his legs , which is why he and Moana go down to his lair to retrieve it. Films — Live-Action. The Jungle Book : The treasure vault in the monkey's lost city is inhabited by a huge python which attacks anyone who tries to take from the treasure.

Reign of Fire : When the young Quinn first stumbles into where the dragon is hibernating, the walls are covered by pyrite We don't get long enough to look at it before all the burning and the death starts. Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real claims that dragons are naturally attracted to shiny objects and may collect hoards of such items, more or less valuable, to allure potential mates.

Smaug is also able to detect that the invisible Bilbo is wearing "something golden" the Ring , which suggests he can sense maybe smell gold. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone mentions that the vaults of Gringotts Wizarding Bank are guarded by trained dragons.

Mythica : The party fight and kill a dragon guarding a hoard, but are unable to rob the hoard. However, dragon teeth are worth gold each, so not all is lost. Conan the Barbarian : Conan and Subotai break into the Tower of the Serpent and discover a pit in which a gigantic snake sleeps coiled around a kind of altar, on which a large red gem is displayed.

Conan succeeds in taking the gem but accidentally wakes the snake with drops of sweat dripping from his face. The snake attacks and nearly kills Conan, but is killed through Conan's and Subotai's joint efforts. Dracopedia : Most dragons will instinctively gather shiny objects with which to line their nests or dens. When the fox wonders why anyone would waste his life in this way, the dragon admits there is no point to his behaviour other than that it is what Jupiter and the Fates have assigned to him.

The moral then draws an explicit parallel between human avarice and miserliness and the pointless gold-hoarding of the dragon. The Saga of the Jomsvikings speculates that a sea-serpent seen in Hjorunga Bay at the Norwegian coast is the ghost of the Jomsviking Bui, guarding the two chests of gold he took with him to his watery grave. The Icelandic Sagas : The Saga of Halfdan Eysteinsson tells how the viking Valr and his two sons, fleeing from enemies and carrying two chests of gold, jump down into a Cave Behind The Waterfall where they "laid themselves on the gold and became flying-dragons".

In The Saga of Gold-Thorir , Gold-Thorir and his companions enter the cave and kill the very same dragons to loot the treasure.

When, many years later, Gold-Thorir disappears without a trace, it is suggested that he himself has turned into a dragon to guard his riches in some secret hiding-place. In The Saga of Yngvar the Traveller , Yngvar and his crew encounter treasure-hoarding dragons twice during their voyage up a great river in Asia: The voyagers get sight of a hill shining like gold in the distance.

In the night, a watchman goes to explore the hill and discovers it is entirely covered by sleeping serpents. He sees a gold ring between the serpents hinting that there may be more treasure underneath the snakes and fishes it out with his spear. This wakes up a small snake which then wakes up all the other serpents and finally the largest, a flying dragon called Jakulus.

Jakulus pursues the watchman and destroys two of Yngvar's ships before returning to his lair. Reaching the source of the great river, the voyagers discover a huge dragon "and much gold lying under it. Shortly after, the voyagers meet a demon who explains the spot where the dragon guards the hoard was the tomb of a very rich king named Siggeus, who also had three daughters who were so greedy two of them killed themselves just because they were jealous of their sisters' wealth.

Later, "dragons ate the king's cadaver and the bodies of his daughters" but also "some believe they've turned into dragons. It is later revealed that his venom has dried up from old age. When Mowgli discovers that men will kill for the treasure, he tells the cobra to train a replacement. In the works of J. He heaped them up in a vault where he spends most of his time just sleeping on it. This habit also has the advantage that the coins and gems grow into his sticky, glowing hot skin, thus providing him with additional armor.

Despite the hoard's fantastical size, after guarding it for decades Smaug knows it so well that he immediately detects the loss of a single cup that Bilbo stole while Smaug was asleep. The dwarves showed up shortly afterward and tried to claim the hoard for themselves as it was originally their gold.

Fram claimed that since he killed the dragon, it was his gold. This caused conflict. In keeping with Tolkein's recurring theme of Evil Tainted the Place , once a dragon claimed and slept on a hoard it would typically become "cursed". At best, this could cause some serious Gold Fever. At worst, it may have played a role in the destruction of two kingdoms.

Farmer Giles of Ham has the dragon Chrysophylax Dives "Gold-watcher the Rich" , whose cave contains fantastical riches of all sorts. How the got all that stuff is never explained, nor does anyone ever ask.

In "The Hoard", a ballad from The Adventures of Tom Bombadil , a dragon kills a dwarf to appropriate the latter's hoard. Later the dragon faces the same treatment through a human warrior. The band Glass Hammer had two entire albums of Middle-Earth based songs. One of them, "The Ballad of Balin Longbeard", featured an elderly dwarven warrior trying to kill a dragon of proportionally equivalent age to raid the hoard. Balin was able to kill the dragon because it was too old to fight effectively, but was himself too old to get out of the way when the dragon's corpse landed on him.

In the works of C. Lewis : '' The Pilgrim's Regress ': "The Northern dragon is so greedy that his anxiety for his gold hardly lets him sleep". In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader , Eustace stumbles upon a dragon's hoard while the dragon is absent actually dead.

He gets greedy, falls asleep on top of it, and is transformed into a dragon himself. Earthsea : Dragons are obsessed with hoarding jewelry In Barbara Hambly 's Dragonsbane series, dragons love gold because dragon magic resonates with it to produce a narcotic-like effect that dragons easily become addicted to. Some dragons manage to break this addiction, however. Dragonology explains that dragons hoard treasure to use as armor for their soft underbelly.

It also states that certain species are capable of learning to concept of value and add collector's items like rare books to their hoard out of avarice. In Guards! Since Ankh-Morpork is a Vestigial Empire of gilded treasures and heavily diluted coinage, there's a lot of ugliness before the dragon is satisfied. Well, somewhat satisfied: "A three-legged lizard wouldn't hoard this lot! Wells find it useful and lucrative to keep a "pest control specialist" in their employ. In the Myth Adventures novels, Gleep explains that dragons hoard gold because it's soft, non-toxic, and corrosion-proof that it's ideal for baby dragons to teethe on.

Dragons with offspring collect it for their young, and grown-up dragons keep it as a sentimental reminder of childhood. In Heir Apparent , the protagonist needs to sneak into a dragon's lair to steal its treasure. In Age of Fire , dragons hoard because they need metal to make scales essentially making the hoard a stockpile of vitamin supplements.

Grey dragons, which don't grow scales, have no need to eat metal and therefore don't bother hoarding it. In The Forgotten Beasts of Eld , the dragon Gyld is old and tired and mostly content to live in Sybel's menagerie, but occasionally longs for his old hoard, which ends up causing some trouble. John Gardner's Grendel features a dragon who hoards gold, and advises Grendel that the only point of life is to "find a pile of gold and sit on it.

The trope is also parodied in a story-within-the-story that includes a dragon who can't hoard gold because he's allergic to it. It's suicide. Unfortunately, one cannot do this and invest one's gold in the stock market at the same time.

Parodied in Grunts! It turns out the dragon was not interested in treasure, but a collector of weapons and militaria. In the Harry Potter series: Justified: As mentioned by Hagrid in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone , the goblins who run Gringotts bank use trained dragons to guard the high-security vaults. The dragons are non-sapient and presumably do not care about gold themselves. The second task in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire involved the champions having to get a golden egg from a dragon.

Again, the dragons didn't actually care about the gold — each golden egg was in a clutch of real ones. In some of the works of Diana Wynne Jones suspected in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland , confirmed in Dark Lord of Derkholm , dragons hoard gold because they have to: they sleep in nests of treasure to absorb nutrients from it.

In Seraphina Dragons hoarded treasure until the treaty and Ardmagar Comonot reforms. Interestingly, the new generation of dragons still hoard in a way, collecting books and sitting on them. In Sekhmet , Dragons are mentioned to have hoards though this range from the traditional gold and gems to more unconventional things like spoons. In Everworld , the only thing dragons seem to care about is money; Merlin has a few who work for him, and at least one argues about fees during their mission.

The series' best example is Nidhoggr, who is huge even by dragon standards and has a hoard to match. Yet, when the protagonists meet him, he's besides himself with misery and fury that some of it namely, four magical items previously belonging to the Celtic gods were stolen by leprechauns.

It was insane, of course. This dragon, this brachiosaurus of a creature, was sitting in and on enough wealth to buy France. And yet, the monstrous thing was crying, weeping swimming pools of tears. Live-Action TV. Doctor Who : Played with in "Dragonfire" , which has Mel and the Doctor go hunting for a rumored treasure that supposedly is guarded by a dragon below the surface of the ice planet Svartos. The Winchesters find themselves up against dragons in "Like a Virgin", albeit of a human-shapeshifting variety.

As well as kidnapping virgins for their Evil Plan , the dragons also steal any gold on their persons. Dean finds a small pile of gold jewelry in their lair, and gleefully helps himself. The electrical conductivity of the copper is suggested to tie in with their fire-breathing abilities.

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia has Charlie make reference to the trope when asked about animals that humans eat but do not eat humans during a Family Feud type game show.

He believes Dragons hoard gold for the purpose of eating it. Classical Mythology 's dragons frequently guard something usually on command of a god , but there is a broad range of objects guarded.

It helps that dragons are often said to never sleep, making them ideal guardians. There are at least two prominent instances of dragons guarding golden MacGuffins : The dragon Ladon was set by Hera to guard the Golden Apples that grow in the Garden of the Hesperides. In Rome, there was a folk belief that dragons guard buried treasure as a natural instinct, and dragons therefore are referenced as epitomes of avarice: Invoked in Cicero 's 13th Philippic Speech delivered March 43 B.

The word Cicero uses "circumplexus" implies that he imagines the dragon literally coiling around his treasure. The fable ends with An Aesop about greed. When describing a painting that showed a dragon, the Greek writer Philostratus 3rd century AD claims that dragons are "devoted to gold", and because of this instinct may guard "treasure that lies hidden under the earth".

Chinese Mythology : The fucanglong or "hidden treasure dragon" lives underground, guarding both man-made treasure as well as natural deposits of precious stone or metal. They are also held responsible for volcanism. In Anglo-Saxon belief, dragons are always hoard-guardians.