Which Tolkien novel features the dragon Glaurung as its chief antagonist?

The story behind the answer

The Children of Húrin features the dragon Glaurung as its chief antagonist.

The novel tells the tragic story of Túrin Turambar and his sister Nienor during the First Age of Tolkien’s world. Glaurung, the Father of Dragons, serves Morgoth and uses both physical destruction and deceptive speech to manipulate the story’s human characters.

Tolkien worked on versions of the tale throughout his life. Christopher Tolkien assembled the published narrative from prose and verse sources, and The Children of Húrin appeared in 2007 as a standalone edition. It expanded material that had previously appeared in The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales.

Glaurung should not be confused with Smaug, the dragon in The Hobbit, or Ancalagon the Black, the enormous dragon associated with the War of Wrath. Those dragons belong to different episodes of Tolkien’s mythology.

Source: Wikipedia · fact-checked Oct. 2026

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