Scatha the Worm

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Dragons of Middle-earth
Ancalagon
Glaurung
Scatha
Smaug

Scatha, known as Scatha the Worm, was a dragon in the fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien.

A mighty Long-worm of the Grey Mountains, little is known of Scatha except that he was slain by Fram son of Frumgar (an ancestor of Eorl the Young) in the early days of the Éothéod. The Long-worms were not a sub-species, but an expression, meaning that Scatha most likely had wings. Also possibly meaning the term came from how skinny some dragons were. This is expressed at the point of which Scatha enters the region of dwarves in the Grey Mountains. He was able to slip through their twenty foot gate. The only other dragon in history possible of doing this would be Glaurung, who was quite small (for a dragon). Smaug or Ancalagon would not be able to. He was not the longest or tallest dragon in Middle-earth (nor were any dragons like him) though he was still larger than Glaurung.

After slaying Scatha, Fram's ownership of his recovered hoard was then disputed by the Dwarves of that region. Fram rebuked this claim, sending them instead Scatha's teeth, with the words, "Jewels such as these you will not match in your treasuries, for they are hard to come by." This lead to his death in a feud with the Dwarves, and however the dispute was resolved, Fram's descendants "brought few good tales from the north of that folk" (from The Lord of the Rings). Certainly the Éothéod retained at least some of the hoard, and brought it south with them when they settled in Rohan. The horn that Éowyn gave to Merry Brandybuck after the War of the Ring (many hundred years later) came from it.