Tag Archives: dragons

How Rich Was Smaug?

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After his first attempt was pilloried by fantasy fans and bean-counters alike, Forbes writer Michael Noer has vastly increased his estimate of the value of Smaug’s horde. See “How Much is a Dragon Worth, Revisited” –

Citing errors in everything from the value of the “Arkenstone of Thrain” to the price of mithril armor, Fictional 15 fans critiqued nearly every aspect of my calculation, usually concluding that I had vastly underestimated the old flamethrower’s net worth. One reader, gvbezoff, pegged Smaug’s wealth to be $870 billion, calling it a “conservative estimate.” For context, that’s about 12.5 times richer than Carlos Slim Helu, the planet’s richest non-fictional being.

[Thanks to Janice Gelb for the story.]

Dragons to Download

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Famed mythopoeic artist and author James A. Owens has made his autobiography about succeeding as an artist, Drawing Out the Dragons, available as a free download until midnight July 4:

Drawing out the Dragons is, I believe, my best, most vital, most necessary work. The responses I’ve gotten since releasing the ebook in April have, at least in part, shown me that my readers feel the same way. But still, as passionate as the comments, letters, and reviews have been, it’s difficult for someone to really explain what the book is, and what effect reading it can have on someone’s life….

There is no reciprocation expected or required, and there is no limitation on the number of downloads during the timeframe of this offer. If you know more than ten people you feel would like it – write to more. Twenty. Fifty. A Hundred. Right now, until midnight tomorrow, the book is free to download and read.

What everyone who does read it chooses to do then is entirely up to them. As all good choices should be.

Dragon Net

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Although my family prefers to believe dragons come from the pen of James Owen, some scientists now claim dragons come from the land Down Under. At least, the Komodo kind of dragon and its much larger, extinct relatives.

For the last 4 million years, Australia has been home to the world’s largest lizards, including the 16-foot-long giant (5 meters) called Megalania, once the world’s largest terrestrial lizard but which died out some 40,000 years ago.

They wonder why the Komodos of Australia died out. For a change the explanation for a vanished species is not that hungry 19th century British sailors ate them all:

Were humans involved? “We have no evidence for this because the youngest Komodo fossils in Australia are around 300,000 years old, well before humans arrived. So we don’t know whether the Komodo dragons in Australia died out before humans arrived or after. So the jury will remain out on this question until a better fossil record is found.”