Beyond Smaug: Fielding the Other Dragons for 10mm Middle-earth

If you’re like me, Games Workshop’s Great Battles in Middle-earth: The Battle of Five Armies box set (slight price increase as of late) and its supporting release of metal blisters were just the beginning of your foray into the 10mm Middle-earth hobby.  You’ve probably perused the plethora of catalogs of 10mm miniatures available on the Web dozens of times in search of models to use for the armies, monsters, beasts, characters, siege works and even architecture that were never a part of GW’s release plans for the system or have since gone out of production (i.e., Smaug, trolls, elven cavalry, spiders of Mirkwood, dwarf archers, bat swarms, and the storm giant).  Not surprisingly, one of the more popular searches is for dragons.

According to The Encyclopedia of Arda, there are two primary divisions and two subdivisions of the dragon race: fire-drakes (urulóki), cold-drakes, flightless fire-drakes (urulóki, fire-drakes of the north), and long-worms.  In the works of Tolkien, all of these types of dragon appear at least once as named characters: Glaurung the Golden (flightless fire-drake, urulokë), Ancalagon the Black (fire-drake, urulokë), Scatha the Worm (cold-drake or long-worm), and Smaug the Golden (fire-drake, urulokë).  As the names suggest, the colors of dragon include, but are probably not limited to, gold, black, and red-gold (Smaug).

There’s a vast array of models from various manufacturers from which to choose proxies for named or generic Middle-earth dragons.  Reaper, for example, has a number of great dragons that would potentially work for 10mm gaming.  Some of my favorites include Shadow Dragon, Dragon of Fire, Silver Dragon, Narthalyssk, Guardian Dragon, Wy’zern, Young Fire Dragon, and Young Ice Dragon.  But if you like the look of GW’s metal Smaug model for BoFA, then it’s probably a good idea to keep aesthetic consistency in mind when looking for more dragon models.  In my opinion, the range of dragons with the closest match to the BoFA Smaug is Dark Swords’ Dennis Mize Dragons from their Visions in Fantasy line.

The Dark Sword dragons match the GW Smaug in terms of both size and aesthetics.  Lithesome, perhaps, is the best adjective to describe the lot.  There is enough variety among the DS dragons to choose proxies for all of the Middle-earth dragon types.  Personally, I think either of the chromatics would work great for Ancalagon and Glaurung (although this would require some minor modeling with Green Stuff, since you wouldn’t need the wings for the latter); and for Scatha, either the green or blue dragon, because they are the longest of the bunch.

NOTE: Painted samples of Dark Sword’s dragons featured in this post are Copyright © Dark Sword Miniatures

REFERENCES:
“Dragons,” Encyclopedia of Arda.
“Dragon (Middle-earth),” Wikipedia.
Asylum Online Store, Reaper.
“Dennis Mize Dragons and Beasties,” Visions in Fantasy, Dark Sword.
Specialist Games, Games Workshop.