Ancalagon the Black

The last weapon of Angband

Ancalagon appears in the histories only once, at the very end of the First Age, and his whole story is contained in the last battle of the War of Wrath. He was the mightiest of the winged dragons that Morgoth had bred in secret in the deeps of Angband while the war went against him. The name is Sindarin, and is understood to mean something like rushing or biting jaws; he was called the Black, and no other description of him survives except the measure of his fall.

The War of Wrath had by then lasted more than forty years. The host of the Valar, with the Vanyar and the Noldor of Aman under Eönwë, and the Edain at their side, had destroyed the armies of Orcs and the Balrogs and had driven Morgoth into the pits beneath Thangorodrim. In his last extremity he released what he had held back. The winged dragons came out of Angband in a storm of fire, lightning and thunder, and the host of the Valar, which had swept everything before it, was driven back from the gates.

The battle in the air

Against the dragons came Eärendil in his ship Vingilot, which had been hallowed and lifted into the sky with the Silmaril on his brow, and with him gathered Thorondor, King of Eagles, and all the great birds of heaven. The battle lasted through a day and a night. Before the sun rose Eärendil slew Ancalagon and cast him down from the sky, and the dragon fell on Thangorodrim, the triple peaks that Morgoth had raised above Angband, and broke them. With his fall the last defence of Angband was gone. The Valar broke open the pits, unroofed the fortress, and took Morgoth in chains.

Nearly all the winged dragons perished with their leader. The texts do not say that Ancalagon had any brood or that any of his kind escaped by name; but since dragons were found in the Northern Waste in the Third Age, some of the lesser worms must have survived the war.

The measure of his fire

Ancalagon's fame after his death rests on a single remark of Gandalf at the Council of Elrond. Explaining that no smith's fire in Middle-earth could destroy the One Ring, Gandalf added that there was not even any dragon left whose fire was hot enough to harm a Great Ring, and that even the fire of Ancalagon the Black, greatest of dragons, could not have touched the One, which was made in the fire of Orodruin. The comparison is the only place in The Lord of the Rings where Ancalagon is named, and it fixes him as the standard against which all dragon-fire is measured: hotter than any other, and still not enough.

Legacy

Ancalagon is the greatest single monster of the legendarium, greater than Glaurung and far greater than Smaug, and yet almost nothing is told of him beyond his size, his colour and his death. The breaking of Thangorodrim in his fall is a measure of both: the mountain-towers that had stood over Beleriand for five centuries were shattered by the weight of one dragon. In the war that followed, Beleriand itself was broken and drowned, and the ruin of the dragon and the ruin of the land are told together.

Slain by Eärendil in the air before the dawn and cast down on Thangorodrim, F.A. 587.