When the Smaug Clears

I’m going to get pedantic for a moment about matters of fantasy.  (Pedantic, moi?)

In heraldry there are two separate symbols called dragons and wyverns.  They are similar looking creatures, both flying reptilian beasts, but there are important distinctions between the two.  A wyvern has two back legs and a pair of wings projecting from its shoulders.  It does not have a separate set of front legs.  If a wyvern needs to crawl, it uses its wings as forelimbs.

A dragon, in contrast, is a six-limbed creature.  It has back legs, front legs, and a separate pair of wings.  The clear distinction between the two, which was codified in the rules of English heraldry back in the 10th century, has been carried through fantasy literature and games.

In Peter Jackson’s second installation of the Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, the creature Smaug, which is supposed to be a dragon, is clearly depicted as a wyvern.  The beast, deftly voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch, crawls across its hoard on rear legs and wings.

Despite the fact that Tolkein’s own drawings included with the first edition of The Hobbit clearly show Smaug to have separate forelimbs and wings, Jackson still could not get this right: one of the many, many things wrong with his telling of this story.  Of all of his mistakes and missteps, this one annoys me the most.

I’ll look beyond the fact that the book The Hobbit is shorter than any one of the Lord of the Ring books yet is being stretched into a trilogy of movies.  For all Jackson left out of the Lord of the Rings, he adds too much to these movies: beyond what is included in the book or appendices.  I’ll overlook the return of Sauron and the related scenes which did not occur in Tolkein’s story.  I’ll forgive the complete misrepresentation of Beorn.  I’ll ignore the inclusion of characters who should not be part of this tale.  I will pretend I did not have to sit through the elf-elf-dwarf love triangle that was inexplicably deemed necessary in this most recent film.  I’m going to grit my teeth and bear the fact that Bard of Lake Town is not an archer with an heirloom black arrow but some sort of artilleryman.  (In fact, let’s pretend that the whole windlance story wasn’t added at all.)  But, the failure with the dragon is unforgivable.

Of all things in this story, I was most excited about seeing Smaug.  Smaug is the iconic dragon of modern fantasy literature, if not of all time.  I was eagerly anticipating seeing him on screen.  I was excited to experience his conversation with an invisible Bilbo Baggins.  I was absolutely beside myself at the thought of finally seeing Smaug rain down destruction on Lake Town before being killed by Bard and his black arrow, thrush on his shoulder whispering in his ear.

I’m going to be robbed of this pleasure, instead being forced to watch a wyvern taken down by a ballista.  For everything he got right in his depiction of the Balrog of Morgoth, Jackson has failed me with Smaug.

Hollywood has a history of misrepresenting dragons as wyverns.  Whether you look at the 1981 Disney movie Dragonslayer, or the dozen year old, poorly plotted Reign of Fire, the beasts are clearly not dragons, but fire-breathing wyverns.  Will anyone ever get this correct?  Movies aren’t the only medium where this mistake has been made.  The so-called dragons of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim are also animated as wyverns.  Skyrim, a game whose object is to slay a dragon before it destroys the world can’t even bother to render a dragon correctly.

 Does no one care about accuracy?