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Tolkien's dragons were inspired by medieval stories including those about [[Fafnir]] in [[Germanic mythology]],<ref name="Shippey 2001"/> and [[The Beowulf Dragon|the ''Beowulf'' dragon]].<ref name="Lee Solopova 2005"/> The folklorist Sandra Unerman writes that Smaug's ability to speak, the use of riddles, the element of betrayal, his enemy's communication via birds, and his weak spot could all have been inspired by the talking [[Germanic dragon]] [[Fafnir]] of the ''[[Völsunga saga]]''.<ref name="Unerman 2002">{{Cite journal |title=Dragons in Twentieth Century Fiction |last=Unerman |first=Sandra |journal=[[Folklore (journal)|Folklore]] |date=April 2002 |volume=113 |issue=1 |pages=94–101 |jstor=1261010 |doi=10.1080/00155870220125462 |s2cid=216644043 }}</ref>
[[Armann Jakobsson]] writes that with the encounter with Smaug, the story in ''The Hobbit'' becomes "more unexpected, entangled, ambiguous, and political". He argues that Tolkien was effectively translating the subtext of his Old Norse sources, creating in his dragon a far more subtle, uncanny, and frightening monster than those in the earlier, more or less unconnected, travel narrative episodes.<ref name="Jakobsson 2009">{{cite journal |last=Jakobsson |first=Ármann |title=Talk to the Dragon: Tolkien as Translator |journal=[[Tolkien Studies]] |volume=6 |issue=1 |year=2009 |doi=10.1353/tks.0.0053 |pages=27–39}}</ref>
The Tolkien scholar [[Thomas Honegger]] notes that Tolkien pointed out that "a 'good dragon' is a beast that
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