Tag: Chinese Idiom

The Chinese dragon is a far different feast from its Western counterpart. Smaug from J.R.R.Tolkien’s "The Hobbit" is perhaps the most widely known dragon from recent Western fiction, a cruel, avaricious and bloodthirsty creature whose lair under the Lonely Mountain identifies him as a creature of the earth. Tolkien drew much of his inspiration for Smaug from the dragon in the Old English epic of "Beowulf", penned more than a thousand years earlier, which gives some indication of depth of the European tradition of portraying dragons as bad news.