“Undoubtedly that was what brought the dragon. 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 for ever, unless they are killed), and never enjoy a brass ring of it.” – J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
A gargantuan, fire-breathing, scaled-covered beast lazing on a mountain of gold. The image reeks of greed. To steal so much, to take, to plunder, to bring death and destitution, and then to hoard. This is the dragon life. As I read the lines above from The Hobbit, my son was puzzled, as anyone should be. “Why does he just sit on all the gold?” It’s easiest to respond with something like, “That’s just what dragons do.” But the truth runs deeper, as it always does.
Stories pull their characters and imagery from experience more broadly. God is the only being who is truly original, who could be said to have pure imagination. All art is a process of uncovering rapturous truth that finds its source in the limitless God. That includes story telling. Surely, no one would’ve known this better than the Inklings (Owen Barfield, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Dorothy L. Sayers and Charles Williams). There is something beneath the dragon image, some deeper meaning that’s potent precisely because it’s suggested rather than stated. Here’s what I believe the suggested truth is for old Smaug the dragon: taking is a disease.
When you take something that belongs to someone else, it feeds an inner darkness, a swelling desire for more. It can start with something menial—a few quarters, a book, an action figure, a t-shirt. For Smaug, it might have been little pockets of dwarvish gold and treasure rooms of covetous kings. But over time, the things start to accumulate. The mound becomes a mountain. And eventually it’s clear that you don’t really want one thing in particular, or even one kind of thing. You just want more. And you’ll guard your own hoard fiercely if anyone threatens to diminish it or even share it for a time. That’s when the dragon emerges. In a host of little ways, we can see children (and ourselves) fall into little pockets of greed—our dragon ventures.
In a world bent on materialism, this doesn’t seem so dangerous. We can even pass greed off as supporting the economy. But evil always fools the world by beginning as a grain of sand, not a boulder. The boulder would cause too much commotion; it would make people stare. But no one stares at a grain of sand. No one blinks at a little obsession for things. The trouble is that these grains of sand gather together in cultures, and they cover up the gospel truth that’s meant to lead our lives: “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35).
As a dragon disease, taking saps our vigor. It weakens us by binding us to the world, which we’ll have to leave behind eventually. It weighs down our spiritual wings. We become so grounded that we can’t remember what the sky of grace looks like, how its clouds call us up higher, above the turning world and into the wildness of a self-sacrificing God.
Giving, by contrast, brings life. It brings the eternal smile of blessing, the grin of God. He’s the one, after all, who saved the whole world by giving himself to it without reservation. He held nothing back so that we could hold the glorious treasure of unending communion with him. Giving is what saves the world. Taking destroys.
Tolkien perhaps never intended this to come out from a reference to Smaug and his hoard of dwarvish gold. It was only meant to inform Bilbo at the start of his journey. But it still informs us today. It’s a worthy lesson for kids: Don’t be a dragon. It’ll only shrink your soul and weaken your wonder at the grace that gives.
God gives all his gold away, and gets richer with every offering. Down with the dragons. Long live the King.
