Note: This is the finalized version of the essay originally published as "How Large Was Smaug Really?" You can also find it on Quora in the Tolkien space The Nine.
Smaug the dragon is one of my favorite villains in literature. He's crafty, cunning, and subtle.
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 quite that big, 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.
However, alternately, if “five feet high and three broad” is taken to indicate a revision of the door’s width to three feet across, we could in fact support a smaller figure. With the further assumption that Smaug’s head at its greatest width was only slightly too big to fit, we get a figure of roughly 70 feet, which lines up with Fonstad’s claim.
As I see it, there are fundamentally two central points of debate here:
What “five feet high and three broad” actually means (5x3 ft, or, as Thrór's Map states, 5 ft high and wide enough for three to walk)
Whether Smaug’s muzzle truly could not fit into the passage or if it was merely the widest point of his skull which could not pass through. Personally I subscribe to the former view but there are valid arguments for the latter.
But Smaug isn’t the only dragon in Arda’s history. There’s also Glaurung, known as the father of dragons, who in the First Age terrorized the Men and Elves of Beleriand. Glaurung was flightless but still possessed powers of speech and fire, as well as being heavily armored in his prime. However, Glaurung’s belly was not armored, and so Túrin son of Húrin hatched a plan to climb up underneath the wyrm as he slithered across a gorge and stab him in the underbelly. The plan succeeded, but of more immediate significance is the size of the gorge.
In The Silmarillion, “Of Túrin Turambar”, (p.221 my copy) Tolkien writes:
...for the dragon lay at Cabed-en-aras, where the river ran in a deep and narrow gorge that a hunted deer might overleap…
On the next page the text states:
...ere the middle-night the dragon rouse, and with a great noise and a blast cast his forward part across the chasm, and began to draw his bulk after.
From the following paragraphs it seems the process of crossing the gorge took Glaurung more than a few seconds, since Túrin was not at the lip of the chasm beforehand, and only reached it by climbing once Glaurung’s forelimbs had already crossed.
Tolkien’s greatest tragedy, The Children of Húrin, further elaborates:
‘[Glaurung] is come to the brink of Cabed-en-Aras, over which, as you tell, a deer once leaped from the huntsmen of Haleth.’ [...] For now the dragon crawled with slow weight to the edge of the cliff, and… made ready to spring over the chasm with his great forelegs and then draw his bulk after. [...] …thereupon he hurled himself forward, and grappled the further cliff with his mighty claws, and began to heave himself across.
These sources, both traditionally set in the upper tiers (though not the ultimate one) of canonicity, agree that Glaurung was capable of leaping (or, more likely, stretching) across a ravine wide enough to (probably) stretch the limits of what a hunted deer is capable of. So how far can a deer jump?
Though I live in Oregon and see deer all the time, I’m not really sure how far, so I asked, and the Internet provided. One source states that a white-tailed deer can leap about 30 feet horizontally in a single bound.
Now, while the West of Middle-earth is not Europe, it is, to an extent, supposed to be a mythologized version of this landmass, which is why I often assume similarities. In this case, it might be more reasonable to base our numbers on a European red deer than on a white-tail. This doesn’t really change the figures much, since as far as I can figure out they’re nearly as nimble as their smaller cousins.
All this to say: Cabed-en-Aras is about 20-35 feet across. If this is about half of the length of Glaurung’s head and torso, he’s (roughly) 70-150 feet long altogether.
This isn't a very precise estimation, but it’s all we’ve really got. In my book, Glaurung can be pretty much as big as you want to imagine him. But Tolkien probably imagined something akin to this (note that the gorge does not match Tolkien’s descriptions). Here is a slightly larger interpretation (~200 ft).
Conclusion on Glaurung: We have less to go by, but he’s at the very least the size of a sauropod dinosaur, and likely over 100 feet in length. (This matches LM1’s estimates on his blog, the most detailed prior work on the subject.) Ancalagon the Black, the greatest of the winged dragons of Thangorodrim, is frequently the source of speculation on whether he could be much, much larger than Smaug. This is not without reason: In Eä, most races become weaker, and more diluted over time.
From The Silmarillion:
But Eärendil came, shining with white flame, and about Vingilot were gathered all the great birds of heaven and Thorondor was their captain, and there was battle in the air all the day and through a dark night of doubt. Before the rising of the sun Eärendil slew Ancalagon the Black, the mightiest of the dragon-host, and cast him from the sky; and he fell upon the towers of Thangorodrim, and they were broken in his ruin.
After this, (most of) the entire region of Beleriand collapsed and fell into the sea. Some have interpreted these passages as meaning that Ancalagon fell and landed on the mountains (“towers”), and thereby destroyed them, and this resulted in Beleriand’s destruction as well.
I take a slightly different view. In my interpretation, Ancalagon’s fall did damage the mountains, but he was not directly responsible for Beleriand’s end. The host of Valinor fought with that of Morgoth for decades across the continent, so it’s really not surprising that there was some collateral damage.
And while I agree that Ancalagon’s fall damaged the towers (since the text really does seem to be saying this, and not that their breaking was unrelated), Durin’s Bane is also described as “[breaking a] mountainside which he smote in his ruin.” And there is no mention of Zirakzigil’s complete destruction.
Add to this the possibilities of “magic” and we get a very tough nut to crack. I think it is obvious to anyone reading this that Ancalagon was very much larger than Smaug or Glaurung, but exactly how much larger is impossible to say.
That said, if we go into assumptions for a moment, we can see that he was likely nowhere near as massive as the popular imagination has him.
Ancalagon must have been able to engage in meaningful combat with Eärendil and Thorondor, and there also had to have been some sort of gate or opening from which he emerged from the earth. Some have put him at about fifty to sixty meters based on the fact that anything much larger violates the established magical-physics laws of this stage of the Legendarium. I would prefer a slightly larger figure, since I also believe Smaug was a little larger, but Ancalagon was almost certainly not a fifteen-mile beast capable of physically crushing all three towers.
Conclusion: Ancalagon was much larger than Smaug, and likely larger than Glaurung.
The smaller figures match something about this size, while a larger but not ridiculous Ancalagon might look like this (roughly Godzilla-sized). (This image of a mile-long Ancalagon breaking through the clouds, while not a likely interpretation of the text, still holds a special place in my heart, and I would not hold it against any future Tolkien adaptations to show a mountain-sized beast.)
For additional support, Tolkien wrote in The Fall of Gondolin (which is far from fully canon, but may reveal Tolkien’s intentions): But there behold a quaking and a trampling, for the dragons labour mightily at beating a path up Amon Gwareth and at casting down the walls of the city; and already there is a gap therein and a confusion of masonry where the ward-towers have fallen in ruin. So the flightless dragons of Morgoth’s forces were capable, in this version of the tale, of breaking down the walls of Gondolin.
The great tower of Turgon was also cast down by the dragons in this tale:
Behold, the tower leapt to a flame and stab of fire. It fell, for the dragons crushed the base of it and all who stood there. Great was the clamour of that terrible fall, and therein passed Turgon King of the Gondothlim, and for that hour the victory was to Morgoth.
Final thoughts As Smaug is “the last of the Great dragons,” Glaurung was the great grandaddy of them all, and Ancalagon was a superlatively huge beast, most dragons were probably a good bit smaller.
I personally picture the average Wyrm of the North at about the size of a smallish commercial airliner at about twenty-five meters or so, compared to Smaug who would rival the size of the largest 747s.
Alternately, using the smaller Smaug figures, the average dragon would be about the size of a large theropod dinosaur at ten meters or so.
NOTE: The preceding was peer-reviewed by The Nine and has received the following assessment using the Canon Scoring System, where a 1, 2 or 3 is considered Canon.
Many thanks to LoreMaster, John Seirra, Laurel Callahan, Sid Kemp, and Nicolò Andreon for their help in revising this article.
*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. While I personally do not hold to this interpretation, it is worth a look at.
**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. I’m open to other interpretations.
***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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