I read The Hobbit when I was 13 years old. By measuring short segments along Smaug's curved spine in the illustration "Conversation with Smaug" I calculated that Smaug was at least 40 times as long as the width across his nostrils.
Smaug was unable to squeeze his head into the opening to the tunnel to breath fire after Bilbo. So if Smaug twisted his neck by 90 degrees to make the wider part of his head vertical, his nostrils would still be too wide for the five foot high door. Thus I calculated that Smaug should have been at least 200 feet long.
The figure of Bilbo in "Conversation with Smaug" is several times too large to be in scale with Smaug, as Tolkien himself said in a letter. The dwarf skulls near to Smaug's head should be closer to the correct scale.
Since Smaug could fold his wings close to his body, and the widest part of Smaug's body seemed to be about a tenth of his total length, Smaug's total length should be ten times the width of the widest part of his body, and the width of the doorways, staircases, tunnels, etc. that Smaug passed through between his lair and the great gate thus limited his maximum possible length.
The size of Smaug gives some clue to the size of his hoard of gold and jewels.
According to some of Tolkien's writings, Morgoth the first dark lord cursed the physical world, putting his evil power in all matter and making it hostile toward living beings. Morgoth seems to have especially cursed gold, making it something that living beings lusted after.
Thousands of years later, during the second Age, Sauron gave rings of power to the seven kings of the Dwarves, hoping to enslave them to his will. But the only effect it had was to make the dwarf kings greedy for gold and seek it by any means possible. Thus the rings were responsible for the seven dwarf kingdoms amassing vast hoards of gold. Since the seven dwarf rings were designed and partially made by Sauron, no doubt they would enchant the gold in the dwarf hoards to make all persons lust after it even more than other gold.
Thousands of ears later, between about Third Age 1000 and Third age 2000, mighty dragons attacked and destroyed six of the seven dwarf kingdoms and slept on their vast hoards of gold, enchanting their gold and jewels with the dragon sickness that made people lust after it even more than for other gold.
The seventh dwarf kingdom, Moria, home to Durin's Race, was abandoned with all its incredibly vast treasures after a balrog, a terrible demon that had served Morgoth thousands of years earlier, attacked the Dwarves. About this time Scatha, the great dragon of the Grey Mountains, was slain by Fram, who took Scatha's treasures despite the claim made by Dwarves, and there was little dragon activity for centuries after.
Centuries later, about Third Age 2700, dragons reappeared and attacked Dwarf communities in the Grey Mountains, stealing their comparatively small but still vast treasures. Thror, king of the Dwarves of Durin's Race, settled in Erebor, the Lonely Mountain, and built up a vast treasure of gold and silver and jewels. Thror was the last Dwarf king to have a ring of power, and so his ring enchanted all the treasure with an even stronger magical lust than the common gold lust from Morgoth's spells.
Then Smaug came and conquered Erebor, and slept on a vast pile of the treasure, enchanting it with dragon sickness in addition to the ring-induced gold lust and the gold lust that all gold had from Morgoth's spells. Smaug's hoard had more gold than all the mined gold in the world today, and yet was tiny compared to the earlier great hoards of Darves, Men, Elves and dragons - and probably smaller than the hoard that Sauron kept for paying salaries and bribes.
Since all the gold in the world was enchanted by Morgoth's spells of gold lust, and since almost all the mined gold had once been part of the seven Dwarf ring hoards or the great dragon hoards, almost all the gold that circulated in Middle-earth as doubly or triply enchanted with spells to make people lust after gold in general and those particular gold items in particular.
Anyone who came in contact with any gold would want to own that gold and also want as much other gold as he could get and put into his hoard. So the vast supply of gold in Middle-earth did not drive on the price of gold. If anything, gold would have been even more sought after than in our time.
A glance at the map of Middle-earth shows that sometime after the end of LOTR there were one or more terrible cataclysms and the shapes of lands and seas changed. Valleys became mountains, mountains became plains, lands fell below the sea and seabeds rose to become land. No doubt all the thousands of hoards of gold, great and small, were buried deep and have never been found again. Most of the gold mined since then has never been part of any hoards in Middle-earth and thus has only the normal amount of gold enchantment on it.
reply
share