Scatha

The worm of Ered Mithrin

Scatha was one of the dragons that bred in the Northern Waste and the Grey Mountains after the First Age. He is known from the annals of the House of Eorl in the Appendices to The Lord of the Rings and from a single object in The Return of the King, and neither source describes him beyond calling him a great dragon and a worm. He held a hoard in the Grey Mountains, and because the texts say nothing of fire he is usually reckoned among the cold-drakes; the Atlas follows that convention while noting that the Appendix does not classify him.

Fram and the Éothéod

After the fall of Angmar in T.A. 1975 the Northmen who would become the Rohirrim, then called the Éothéod, moved north under their lord Frumgar to the upper vales of Anduin, between the Misty Mountains and the northern reaches of Mirkwood, a land that put them within reach of the dragon-haunted Grey Mountains. Frumgar's son Fram slew Scatha, and the Éothéod were freed from the fear of the long-worms of the North. The date is not given; it falls early in the twentieth century of the Third Age, in the generation after the migration.

Fram took the hoard, and it brought him trouble. The Dwarves of the Grey Mountains claimed the treasure as their own, saying the dragon had taken it from them; Fram refused, and instead sent them the dragon's teeth strung on a necklace, with a message that they were welcome to jewels of that sort since they were hard to come by. The Dwarves did not forget the insult, and the Appendix records that it was said Fram was killed by them. The enmity between the Éothéod and the Dwarves of the North dated from that quarrel.

The horn of the Mark

Part of Scatha's hoard came south with Eorl when the Éothéod rode to the Field of Celebrant in T.A. 2510 and were given Rohan. Among it was a small silver horn, wrought by the Dwarves with a horseman riding on it and runes of virtue, an heirloom of the House of Eorl. Éowyn gave it to Merry at the parting of the Rohirrim from the hobbits after Théoden's funeral, telling him it had come from Scatha's hoard, and Merry blew it in the Shire to raise the hobbits against Sharkey's men. So the last of the dragon's treasure did its work at the far end of Middle-earth, a thousand years after his death.

Legacy

Scatha is the only dragon of the Third Age other than Smaug to be named, and the only one slain by a Man before Bard. His story is a compressed version of the pattern that the greater dragons follow at length: the worm, the hoard, the slayer, and the quarrel over the gold that outlives them all.

Slain by Fram son of Frumgar early in the Third Age.