Lesser dragons; those of dragon-kind who did not have the ability to make fire.They were used by Morgoth in the wars of the First Age,though no specific mention of them in this period remains in Tolkien's published work.After the War of Wrath,in which most would have perished,some few seem to have escaped into the northern regions of Middle-earth,beyond the Grey Mountains.As the millennia passed,their numbers grew,until they became a serious threat in the later centuries of the Third Age to the Dwarves that mined the Grey Mountains.In the year 2589 of the Third Age,D�in I,King of Durin's Folk and his second son Fr�r were slain at the gates of their halls by a Cold-drake.The attacks of these fearsome creatures persuaded the Dwarves to migrate eastwards from the Grey Mountains and it was soon afterwards that their realms in the Iron Hills and at Erebor were established.Of the history of the Cold-drakes after this period we are given no hint.Four hundred years later,at the time of Bilbo Baggins' journey to Erebor,they seem to have left the Grey Mountains,at least,Gandalf makes no mention of them when describing the dangers of that region.It is possible that the Orcs who colonised the Mountains after the departure of the Dwarves drove them back into the cold wastes to the north but we can do no more than speculate on their ultimate fate.
The Fire Drakes :
The more powerful of the two fundamental divisions of dragon-kind,who,as the name suggests,were able to breathe fire.Glaurung,Ancalagon and Smaug were all fire-drakes.The only explicit reference is in The Silmarillion (Of the Return of the Noldor); "�Glaurung,the first of the Urul�ki,the fire-drakes of the North,issued from Angband's gates by night."
Smaug,the last of the truly powerful dragons,was slain by Bard in the late Third Age.We can be sure that he was not the last of the fire-drakes,though,because Gandalf refers to fire-breathing dragons in the time before the War of the Ring,nearly eighty years after Smaug's death.Tolkien even goes so far as to hint that some of these creatures might have survived to our own times.
The Long Worms :
A type of dragon found in the northern parts of Middle-earth, and perhaps elsewhere.The most famous long-worm (and in fact the only one that Tolkien explicitly identifies) was Scatha of the Ered Mithrin, who preyed on the Dwarves and Men of the Grey Mountains and was slain by Fram of the �oth�od. Though Tolkien gives almost no clues about long-worms in the text of The Lord of the Rings,his illustrations of dragons give us some further hints.Tolkien's dragons tend to be sinuous,serpentine creatures,having the appearance almost of a winged snake rather than the more traditional dragon-form.This would explain the term 'long-worm' easily.It's interesting to note that Tolkien gave this form to another northern dragon,Smaug,which strongly suggests that he,too,was one of the long-worms.
The Urul�ki :
The fire-drakes;dragons who breathed fire.Glaurung,Father of Dragons,was the first of these.He first appeared in the middle of the First Age but the urul�ki certainly survived the downfall of their master, Morgoth.Ancalagon apparently belonged to this kind and Smaug,the great fire-breathing dragon that sacked Erebor,seems to have been the last of the great urul�ki.Other lesser types apparently survived to the end of the Third Age and beyond.
