LOL! In this silly The Lord of the Rings meme the Witch King of Angmar is mansplaining to Éowyn right before she kills him. Which she is able to do of course because she is “no man”.
Witch King of Angmar: “Well actually…”
Éowyn: *STABS*
Witch King of Angmar: *dies*
Also obviously his rant is wrong, J. R. R. Tolkien clearly meant literally “no man” can kill him, as in no human male. So a female human or any other species really could have killed him (I’m pretty sure). It probably also helped that Merry Brandybuck the hobbit stabbed him too. This whole thing seems like a pretty big loophole but meh. Anyway here is the exact passage from The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King:
“But no living man am I! You are looking upon a woman. Eowyn am I, Eomund’s daughter. You stand between me and my lord and kin. Begone, if you be not deathless! For living or dark undead, I will smite you, if you touch him.”
-Éowyn, Shieldmaiden of Rohan and Certified Badass
(The Lord of the Rings mansplaining meme via: The Lord of the Rings & The Hobbit)
What do you think? Leave a comment below!
I love to cheer on Eowyn when she sticks it to the witch king, and know that she is “technically correct, the best kind of correct” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hou0lU8WMgo
Prophesies in fiction often have these amusing little loopholes. Prophets in reality often did similar to allow themselves to weasel out of the fact that they were charlatans.
This is simply the same concept with Odysseus and Polyphemus, where Odysseus gave his name as ‘Noman’ so that when Polyphemus asked for help, he was saying noman was harming him and his friends figured it was the gods and left him alone.
There’s no loophole and Eowyn is right. If you read the appendixes you will see that the Witch King of Angmar flees from an elf (Glorfindel i think), who he knows is “no man”, and Merry is able to injure him because he also is “no man”.
Tolkien drew 2 things from Macbeth (by his own admission):
1).
MACBETH:
“. . .I bear a charmed life, which must not yield,
To one of woman born.
MACDUFF
. . .Macduff was from his mother’s womb
Untimely ripp’d.”
2) He was not happy that Birnham Wood didn’t literally rise up against Macbeth, so he made up the Ents to do that to Saruman
it turns out the “no man can kill me” line was a condensed form of two different lines of the prophesy.
as shown in the article, the Witch-king’s line in the novel was “no living man may hinder me”, the other line is “not by the hand of man shall he fall”. this is important as one of them was referring to race and the other referred to gender.
the line “no living man may hinder me” referred to race and was fulfilled in two ways. first, by Merry, a hobbit, with the use of an enchanted barrow-blade. second, the enchantment was placed by a man, specifically the weaponsmith, and was intended to hinder the Witch-king, and only worked because the weaponsmith was long-dead, which bypassed the ‘living’ condition.
the line “not by the hand of man shall he fall” referred to gender and was fulfilled by Eowyn. this was officially confirmed.
Tolkien was a scholar of mythology and this is a classic geas- essentially a prophesy like that in MacBeth.
As in MacBeth and in some of the Celtic myths, the character is unwitting that the geas is broken.
And yet………. he is dead. Or re-dead I suppose. So either the prophecy was in error and it meant male, or……..hmmm. I really dont see that it could mean “MANKIND” in general. He’s dead. Killed by the hand of a female human and irrevocably at that. If there was any chance at regeneration then it went hell with the destruction of the ring shortly after that.