Naming Dragons, from Fafnir to Smaug

Fafnir Was a Man Before He Was a Worm

The name Fafnir is usually derived from Old Norse fadma, to fathom or to embrace, which makes the dragon "the embracer." That sounds gentle until you know the story. Fafnir is not born a dragon. He murders his father Hreidmarr for Andvari's cursed gold, then "took the shape of a worm" and withdrew to Gnitaheath to lie on what the murder bought. The embracer is the coil around the hoard. His body is his name acted out.

The poem Fafnismal opens with the dragon dying on Sigurd's sword and demanding to know who struck him. Sigurd answers with a pseudonym. He calls himself the Noble Hart, gofugt dyr, and claims to go "a motherless man abroad." Only under more questioning does he yield, "Sigurth my name, and Sigmund's son." Bellows, in his note on the passage, explains the caution, "it was believed in olden times that the word of a dying man might have great power if he cursed his foe by his name."

The Volsunga saga carrying the fullest version is a late 13th-century Icelandic prose rendition of the Volsung cycle. Its only surviving medieval manuscript, Ny kgl. Saml. 1824 b 4to in the Royal Library of Denmark, dates to about 1400. The north's great dragon story is, among other things, about name security. The dragon's name is a job description anyone may speak. The hero's name is a password he surrenders at his peril.

Tiamat Is Just the Akkadian Word for Sea

Tiamat's name derives from ti'amtum, shortened tamtu, the ordinary Akkadian word for sea. Name and noun sat so close that some copyists of the Enuma Elish simply substituted the everyday tamtu where the goddess's name belonged. The most primordial dragon name on record is barely a name at all.

In the epic she is the saltwater ocean mated to Apsu, the groundwater. After Apsu is killed she creates eleven monsters and gives her lover Qingu the Tablet of Destinies, and Marduk defeats her anyway. He splits her "like a shellfish into two parts," roofs the sky with one half, and her eyes become the sources of the Tigris and the Euphrates. The sea got a name, the name grew a body, and the body was recycled into geography.

Whether that body was a dragon's is honestly unclear. The Assyriologist Alexander Heidel concluded that a "dragon form can not be imputed to Tiamat with certainty," since the text gives her breasts alongside a tail. The poem runs to seven tablets of roughly a thousand lines, dates to the Second Dynasty of Isin in the late 2nd millennium BCE, and reached us through the Library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, published by George Smith in 1876 as The Chaldean Account of Genesis. Three thousand years of copying, and the text still keeps her shape open.

Malice Striker, a Name Built Like an Accusation

Nidhoggr compounds two working parts. Nid was an Old Norse legal and social term for a state of dishonor and stigma, and -hoggr means striker, which yields glosses like Malice Striker. An alternative reading takes the first element from nidr, downwards, and gives striker from below. Either way the name is a charge sheet. The Norse named their worst dragon the way a court names an offense.

The offenses are on record. In Voluspa he sucks the corpses of the dead at Nastrond, "Þar saug Nidhoggr nai framgengna," and in the poem's final stanza "the dim dragon flying" carries corpses in his feathers as the seeress sinks down. In Grimnismal he gnaws one of Yggdrasil's roots from beneath, a root Snorri's Gylfaginning places over Niflheim, while the squirrel Ratatoskr runs the trunk hauling "envious words" between the eagle at the crown and the dragon at the bottom. The world tree runs a dedicated gossip courier to keep his malice supplied.

Notice what the name never mentions. No fire, no wings, no gold. It names a social wrong and a direction of attack, and lets the poems handle the body, which in Voluspa apparently includes feathers. A name that indicts is scarier than a name that describes, because an indictment implies someone kept records.

The Deadly Glance Beneath Dinas Emrys

Welsh draig descends from Latin draco, itself from Greek drakon, which apparently derives from drak-, the aorist stem of derkesthai, to see clearly. The literal sense would be something like "the one with the (deadly) glance." The same Latin word surfaced in English as dragoun in the mid-13th century. Underneath the whole western dragon vocabulary sits not a body but a stare.

The earliest text of the red dragon legend, the Historia Brittonum of about 828, has Vortigern's fortress at Dinas Emrys repeatedly collapsing because two dragons fight beneath it, a red one standing for the Britons and a white one for the Saxons. Y Ddraig Goch, the red dragon, is barely a personal name at all, just a color and a creature. It works because this dragon is a flag with teeth, and flags do not need first names.

The Past Tense of Squeezing Through a Hole

Tolkien settled Smaug's etymology himself in a 1938 letter to The Observer. The name, he wrote, is "a pseudonym," being "the past tense of the primitive Germanic verb smugan, to squeeze through a hole," and he filed the whole business as "a low philological jest." Grammatically, Smaug is not a roar. He is a completed action, something that already squeezed through.

The jest has a punchline. The Lacnunga, an 11th-century Anglo-Saxon medical text, preserves a charm "wid smeogan wyrme," against a penetrating worm, built on the same Old English root, smeagan or smeah, that stands behind Smaug. Tolkien named his dragon with the very word an Anglo-Saxon healer would have muttered over something burrowing where it should not.

Tom Shippey adds the twist that makes it art. Old English smeag, whose Norse form is smaug, meant both penetrating and subtle or crafty, and the verb smeagan also meant to consider, ponder, examine. One root covers the body that creeps through holes and the mind that creeps through riddles. The name performs the dragon's whole character in a syllable, which is why it feels found rather than made.

One Heavy Syllable and a Job Description

Line the survivors up and the recipe shows. Fafnir the embracer, Nidhoggr the malice striker, Smaug the squeezed-through, drakon the deadly watcher, Tiamat the sea itself. Each is an ordinary word for a motion or a stare, dressed in weight. The sounds pull the same direction. Smaug is one heavy syllable around a long dark vowel, Nidhoggr thuds on its doubled consonants, Tiamat flows because it literally is the word for water. An invented dragon name lands when the mouth feels mass and the mind suspects a verb.

A recent batch cued on the dragon namer turned up Veormanth, the Year-Eating, Mammoss, the Tide-Born, Curiliar, the Grudge-Bearing, and Haguntonth, Lady of the Iron Marshes. The invented syllables carry the tonnage and the epithet carries the job description, the mythological split exactly. Fafnir would file cleanly among them as Fafnir, the Embracing, and Smaug, on Tolkien's own account, is a pseudonym anyway.

Hidden is the operative word. Remember the trench on Gnitaheath, where Sigurd would not hand a dying dragon his name for fear of the curse it could carry. Run the same economy at your table. Everyone knows the epithet, almost no one knows the name, and learning it should cost something. When the name needs a body and a hoard behind it, the dragon descriptions generator supplies the rest.