The following is planned to be submitted for canon review in the Quora space The Nine.
You can find the final draft here.
Smaug the dragon is one of my favorite villains in literature. He's crafty, cunning, and subtle. But he's also a dragon. Which means he can spew flames from his mouth and break stone with his talons. And fly.
But exactly how big was Tolkien's monster? We all have different mental pictures of the beast from the North, and we imagine him all shapes and sizes. For instance, Karen Wynn Fonstad's Atlas of Middle-Earth puts the Wyrm at a mere 59 feet in length, while Peter Jackson's Hobbit film trilogy shows a massive beast the size of two jumbo jets.
I have debated this back and forth on Quora a few times, including with the good David M. Prus, an excellent fellow worth a follow. This article is an attempt to collect the available data and settle the question.
Here are the facts:
Smaug is described as "a vast red-golden dragon" when Bilbo first sets eyes on him amidst the treasure-hoard of Thrór.
When antagonized by the Hobbit, Smaug charges at him and tries to shoot fire after him up the side-tunnel. The door is described as "five foot high... and three may walk abreast"*. Tolkien writes, "the ghastly head of Smaug was thrust against the opening behind. Luckily the whole head and jaws could not squeeze in, but the nostrils sent forth fire and vapour to pursue him...".
Tolkien once drew Smaug atop his hoard in Erebor, with a nominal silhouette of Bilbo in the foreground. This, I believe, was the source of Fonstad's claim.
In Letter #27, writing to his American publishers, Tolkien wrote of this artwork: "The hobbit in the picture of the gold-hoard, Chapter XII, is of course (apart from being fat in the wrong places) enormously too large. But (as my children, at any rate, understand) he is really in a separate picture or 'plane' – being invisible to the dragon."
When Smaug was killed by Bard the Bowman, "With a shriek that deafened men, felled trees and split stone, Smaug shot spouting into the air, turned over and crashed down from on high in ruin. Full on the town he fell. His last throes splintered it to sparks and gledes. The lake roared in. A vast steam leapt up, white in the sudden dark under the moon. There was a hiss, a gushing whirl, and then silence."**
A few years back I published a rather rough estimate of Smaug's size based on these evidences. It was intended to give a general sense of scale, rather than to be a definitive answer to the question. You may observe that it does not account for perspective, which undoubtedly throws it off in the case of such a large creature. Still, I came up with a minimum number of just over 100 feet.
Others have also tackled this question, and come up with similar answers. u/Tolkienite on Reddit, basing his estimate on the same "five foot high and three broad" statements, came to the conclusion that Smaug is at least 140 feet long, and could be around 300. Following in his footsteps, u/Venoxxis also concluded that Smaug is approximately 300 feet long from head to tail.***
Even if these calculations are flawed, the fact remains that there is no evidence for a smaller Smaug, and the text fits a larger dragon (~150-300 feet in length) much better. Even if Smaug isn't 300 feet, the fact that his head could not fit into the doorway precludes us from allowing for a fifty-foot figure.
My conclusion: Smaug is over a hundred feet in length, and probably over 200.
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*When the hidden door is opened, Tolkien states that it is "five feet high and three broad" which some have taken as meaning the Professor changes his mind on the dimensions of the passageway and intended it to be understood as a tunnel five feet by three feet, rather than five feet high and wide enough for three Dwarves to walk abreast. No evidence supports this interpretation, and the text does not require the dimensions to have changed.
**I interpret this as meaning that Smaug's initial impact heavily damaged the town, but that it was not entirely destroyed until his death throes caused further destruction. Alternately, it could import that his throes and the impact happened simultaneously, and that the town was immediately destroyed.
***Kepeckley23 of VS Battles Wiki estimated based on a different sketch that Smaug is over 400 feet in length. However, this figure relies on a guesstimate for the width of Lake-Town, and so should not in my mind be relied upon.
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