Cold-drakes

What is stated

The cold-drakes are the least described of the dragon kindreds. The term occurs once in the published texts, in the history of Durin's folk in the Appendices to The Lord of the Rings. After Thorin I led most of the Longbeards from Erebor north to the Grey Mountains in T.A. 2210, the Dwarves prospered there for more than three centuries. But the Grey Mountains bordered the Northern Waste where the surviving dragons of the elder world had bred again, and from about T.A. 2570 those dragons grew strong and began to raid the Dwarves' works and plunder their halls. In T.A. 2589 a great cold-drake attacked the hall of King Dáin I, and the king and his second son Frór were killed at its doors. The Dwarves abandoned the Grey Mountains the following year: Thrór took the greater part of the people back to the Lonely Mountain, and his brother Grór led the rest to the Iron Hills.

That is the whole of what the texts say directly. The word itself carries the meaning: a cold-drake is a dragon that does not breathe fire, in contrast to the fire-drakes, the Urulóki of Morgoth. Since the cold-drake of Dáin's hall is called great, and since it killed a Dwarf-king and his son in front of their own gate and was not itself killed, the cold-drakes were plainly formidable even without flame.

What is inferred

Scatha, the great worm of the Grey Mountains slain by Fram of the Éothéod early in the Third Age, is not called a cold-drake in the Appendices. He is called a dragon and a worm, and nothing is said of fire. Because he lived in the same mountains as the cold-drakes and because no fire is recorded, the Atlas places him here, but the classification is a convention and not a statement of the text. The same is true of the unnamed dragons that harried the Dwarves after 2570: the texts call them dragons, and the one that killed Dáin is the only one distinguished as a cold-drake.

Whether the cold-drakes descended from Morgoth's dragons of the First Age or were a separate breeding is not said. The most economical reading is that the dragons that escaped the War of Wrath, fire-drakes and winged dragons alike, bred in the Northern Waste over five thousand years, and that some of their descendants lost the fire of their ancestors, just as Gandalf said at the Council of Elrond that no living dragon's fire was hot enough to melt a Ring. On that reading the cold-drakes are the dwindled remnant of the great worms, and the Withered Heath where the dragons bred was their nursery.

Fate

Nothing more is recorded. The cold-drakes are the reason the Grey Mountains remained empty of Dwarves for the rest of the Third Age, and presumably they were still there at its end.

Not described beyond the name. Great serpents without fire; large enough to kill a Dwarf-king in armour at his own gate.

None recorded.

Presumably the descendants of the dragons that escaped the War of Wrath into the Northern Waste, in whom the ancestral fire had failed; the texts do not say.

Unrecorded after T.A. 2589. Still presumed to haunt the Grey Mountains and the Northern Waste.