The Hobbit: Where Did Dragon-Sickness Originally Come From?

gamerant.com:

Smaug is probably the most iconic dragon of modern fantasy culture. He is the epitome of everything a dragon should be: fierce, intelligent, greedy and magnanimous. During Bilbo’s confrontation with him, the audience can see Smaug cleverly trying to prize information out of the hobbit, using every tactic in the book, from belittling the smaller creature, to making him doubt his expendability in Thorin’s eyes. But the key thing that the audience learns about Smaug in this interaction is that he is the literal embodiment of dragon-sickness. He is the dragon that has sat brooding over a pile of gold for so long that it has infected his mind, and he has infected the treasure in return.

This is a motif that is carried on throughout the film, for example in the fact that both Thorin and Smaug share the line “I will not part with a single coin, not one piece of it.” The line shows how their gold-lust has essentially become a mental illness, to the point where they would be willing to wage war, slaughter hundreds, and even die themselves for the sake of not giving up the most minute amount of the money in all the thousands and thousands of troves of gold in the halls. But where does Dragon-sickness originally come from in Tolkein's world?

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Right through from his younger years into his days as a student and then as a professor, Tolkien loved dragons, and the myths and legends surrounding them. Dragons have existed in lore for thousands of years, across all areas and countries, from the medieval writings of King Arthur and his knights, to the Norse stories that came across from the sea, to the dragon-gods of Chinese tradition, to the Anglo-Saxon stories surrounding Beowulf and his monsters (which were