Dragons were certainly among the most formidable creatures in all of The Lord of the Rings. Created by some machination of Morgoth, the great drakes of old fought alongside their Dark Lord in his wars against the Valar. Fortunately, most of Morgoth’s dragons were vanquished during the War of Wrath or driven to the far north of Middle-earth. However, late in the Third Age, a dragon ventured South. Prompted by the Dwarf Lord Thrór's greed, Smaug arrived at Erebor with gold on his mind and destruction in his heart.

Reclaiming Erebor and reestablishing its Dwarf kingdom were the two premises of The Hobbit. Gandalf knew that Sauron could potentially use a dragon to “terrible effect,” so when the wizard sent Thorin on his quest, what he really wanted was for Smaug to be out of the picture. Thorin’s rag-tag group of adventurers succeeded in its quest and killed the dragon, but one might question if Gandalf would still have wanted Smaug dead if he had known that Bilbo had found Sauron’s Ring.

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Flashing forward nearly eight decades to the year 3018, the question would become more pressing. Sauron was threatening to take over Middle-earth, and his Black Riders had already chased Frodo and company to Rivendell. There, Gandalf watched as everyone at the Council of Elrond debated what he already knew was a foregone conclusion: Sauron’s Ring had to be destroyed.

Gimli tried to break it with his axe, but Elrond quickly chided him that the only way to destroy the One Ring was to drop it into the superheated fires of Mount Doom, where it was created. During that moment, one might wonder whether Gandalf had any regret in arranging the death of the Dragon of Erebor. Perhaps Smaug’s dragon-fire could have presented him with an alternative to sending the Fellowship on a treacherous journey into Mordor.

Dragons were never ones for real alliances, but maybe Gandalf could have convinced the drake that Sauron was a threat to his gold. Maybe, then, Smaug would have brought his might against the Dark Lord, or if nothing else, Smaug could have tried to destroy the One Ring in secret.

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It’s an interesting hypothesis, especially when considering that dragon-fire successfully destroyed four of the Rings of Power that Sauron gave to the Dwarves. However, the whole query isn’t a hypothetical situation because Gandalf addressed this very question early in The Fellowship of the Ring. When Frodo asked about destroying the Ring, Gandalf told him, “It has been said that dragon-fire could melt and consume the Rings of Power, but there is not now any dragon left on earth in which the old fire is hot enough; nor was there ever any dragon, not even Ancalagon the Black, who could have harmed the One Ring, the Ruling Ring, for that was made by Sauron himself.”

That quote pretty much negates this whole line of thought. Smaug’s dragon-fine would not have been hot enough to destroy the One Ring. The malevolence that Sauron put inside of the Ring could only be destroyed in the Cracks of Doom, so Frodo was compelled to make the journey to Mordor.

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