I am happy to post this interview what is binary option with author Benita J. Prins, fellow lover of all things Tolkien and a great writer in her own right too! I read her fantasy, Sea of Crystal, Sea of Glass recently and recommend … Continue reading
The Lord of the Nazgûl rides into the Pelennor Fields believing himself inviolable. Behind him lies the shattered gate of Minas Tirith, before him lie the broken remnants of the Rohirrim, and above him hangs the prophecy he has carried for centuries: no man shall ever kill him. The fulfilment of that prophecy arrives in the form of a woman of the Mark and a halfling from the Shire. It is one of the most quietly radical scenes in modern fantasy, and its aftershocks continue to shape the way Australian readers, writers, and scholars think about gender, heroism, and the boundaries of the possible.
For a single moment in the midst of Tolkien's great battle, the gender contract that had organised heroic literature for centuries is rewritten in front of our eyes. A figure who should have been consigned to the hearth and the hall picks up a sword. A creature of pure masculine terror meets a sword-arm he never expected. The Witch-king's fall matters not because it is sensational but because it is woven so deeply into the moral fabric of Tolkien's work, a fabric that Australian readers have been reading for nearly a century and that continues to influence writers from Melbourne to Perth.
Tolkien understood prophecy as something heavier than plot machinery. The Witch-king's protection, the old rhyme that no living man might hinder him, is not merely a clever way to set up a surprise. It is a theological claim about the ordering of the world. The Lord of the Nazgûl is the chief of the servants of Sauron, and Sauron himself rose in an age when the shadows of Morgoth fell thickest across the north. The Rings of Power, the long wars of the Second Age, the corruption of Númenor, all of this history presses down on the moment at the gate.
The prophecy is gendered from its first utterance. It assumes that men will be the ones who rise against the Witch-king, that the great captains of Gondor and the horselords of the Mark will be the ones to face him. Tolkien knows this assumption, and he builds the scene to overturn it. The Witch-king, who sees through his helm the living and the dead, who is said to be filled with fear when he sees Éowyn, is undone not by a great captain but by a shield-maiden whose hands have never known a battle of this scale.
| Source | Who Strikes the Witch-king | The Prophecy Worded How | The Tone of the Moment |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Return of the King (book) | Éowyn with Merry's help, using a Barrow-blade forged in Westernesse | "No living man may hinder me" | Tragic, mournful, almost tender as Éowyn names herself |
| Peter Jackson's film (2003) | Éowyn primarily, with Merry's stab dramatised | "No man can kill me" | Loud, operatic, with the line delivered as a battle cry |
| Stage retellings and radio adaptations | Often simplified, sometimes removing Merry's role entirely | Reduced to a vague "no man" prophecy | Varied; some emphasise spectacle over moral weight |
| Critical readings by Australian scholars | Éowyn and Merry read as a complementary pair | Treated as a theological riddle about the nature of manhood | Treated with the gravity of a sacramental moment |
The table makes clear that Tolkien's version is the strangest and most patient. The film delivers the line as a slogan; the book treats it as an oracle being slowly, painfully interpreted.
Before the gate, in the ruined hall of the Houses of Healing, Faramir speaks to Éowyn about the choices that lie before her. He says that she may be a healer rather than a rider, that she may set down the shield and take up the linen. It is a kind offer, and in some readings of the scene it is a generous one. Yet Éowyn knows, and Tolkien knows, that the offer still rests on the assumption that the glory of war belongs to men and the gentle arts belong to women.
It is precisely this division that she refuses. She rides to war not as a rebel against her gender but as a fulfilment of it. She tells Merry, when they plan their journey from Edoras, that she wishes to look on a great battle and on a king in his glory. The wish is personal, almost naive, but it leads her to the gate and to the Witch-king's horse. The sword she bears is the one she was permitted to carry as a shield-maiden of the household; she simply uses it as it was always meant to be used.
Her final words to the Witch-king, "I am no man," are not a boast. They are a correction of the ancient record. The Witch-king has trusted the grammar of the world, and Éowyn quietly breaks it. The scene works because Tolkien refuses to make her violent merely to prove a point. She is frightened, she has been bruised, and she does not triumph alone.
A reading of the Pelennor scene that fixes only on Éowyn misses half of its meaning. Merry Brandybuck, the smallest member of the Fellowship's broken company, drives his sword into the back of the Witch-king's knee. The blade is one of those taken long ago from the Barrow-downs, forged in the ancient kingdom of Westernesse for the war against the King of Angmar himself. It was made for this moment.
Tolkien's choice to give the finishing stroke to a hobbit rather than to Aragorn or to a returning champion is one of the deepest critiques of heroic masculinity in the whole of modern fantasy. The great captains of the West have been defeated or scattered, the men of the towers are dead on the plain, and it falls to a gardener's son and a woman of the shield-arm to finish what armies could not. The enchanted sword that Merry bears has waited centuries for a hand that could wield it, and that hand turns out to belong to someone who has never been taught to be a warrior.
Australian readers have long noticed the kinship between this moment and the egalitarian spirit of their own literary traditions. From the bush ballads of Banjo Paterson to the fantasy of writers working out of Melbourne and Brisbane, the figure of the underestimated small person doing what must be done is a familiar one. The Hobbit itself was first read aloud in Australian dugouts during the First World War, and the homecoming of a returned soldier carrying a battered copy of the book became its own quiet ritual.
When the Lord of the Nazgûl sees Éowyn standing before him, the text records that he is filled with fear. Tolkien's language is restrained but unmistakable. The Witch-king, whose presence has broken the courage of soldiers and kings, hesitates. The hesitation is brief, but it is the first crack in his long certainty.
The fear is not merely tactical. The Witch-king is a Maia reduced by his rings into something almost entirely will, and his will has been organised around the prophecy. When a woman and a hobbit step forward to face him, the categories that have defined him begin to fail. His terror is the terror of a long-held assumption collapsing. Tolkien, who had survived the trenches of the Somme and knew what it meant to see the structures of civilisation buckle, understood that moment intimately.
This is why the scene is more than a clever twist. It is a meditation on the limits of any system that relies on the assumed supremacy of one kind of body. When the Witch-king falls, it is not merely a king of terror who is undone but a whole pattern of gendered heroism that has organised the Third Age. The pattern will, of course, partly restore itself in the days that follow; Tolkien was no utopian. Yet the breach has been made, and readers cannot unsee it.
Australian readers have a particular relationship with Tolkien's work, partly because the country's small presses and independent bookshops kept the books in print during years when they were hard to find elsewhere. Allen & Unwin Australia, the descendant of the same house that first published The Hobbit in 1937, remains one of the country's most respected publishers, and its editions of Tolkien's work are read in homes from Fremantle to Fitzroy. Readings in Carlton runs Tolkien nights in its basement; Dymocks in the Sydney CBD keeps the trilogy in its window display year after year; the Australian Tolkien Society gathers annually in different state capitals to discuss passages exactly like the one at the gate.
These gatherings matter because they tend to treat the Witch-king's death as a literary event rather than a piece of spectacle. Australian scholars and critics, working within the framework of the Copyright Act 1968 and the educational provisions that govern fair dealing for criticism and review, have produced some of the most careful readings of the moment. They point out that Tolkien's insistence on naming Éowyn before she strikes is a deliberate counter to the medieval chronicles that often erased women from the battlefield record.
Australian writers of fantasy have also taken the Pelennor moment as a kind of permission slip. Garth Nix, who grew up between Melbourne and Sydney before publishing the Old Kingdom series, has spoken of rereading The Return of the King as a teenager and feeling the weight of Éowyn's choice settle into his own imagining. Newer writers working out of Brisbane and Perth continue to draw on that moment when they construct heroines who refuse to wait at the threshold.
The Pelennor scene is one of the founding gestures of modern fantasy, and almost every major work that has followed owes it a debt. When Ursula K. Le Guin gives us Tenar in The Tombs of Atuan, when Robin McKinley writes Aerin in The Hero and the Crown, when later writers such as N. K. Jemisin or Samantha Shannon construct heroines who fight on their own terms, they are working in a tradition that the Witch-king's fall helped to make possible.
The debt is not always direct. Many writers have arrived at similar conclusions through very different paths. Yet the shape of the Tolkien scene, with its underestimated figure, its old prophecy, and its moment of identification, has become so familiar that it now passes almost unnoticed. That is perhaps the highest compliment a literary moment can receive: to become a piece of grammar in the language of the genre.
Australian bookshops report that readers still pause at the same pages of The Return of the King that they paused at forty years ago. The scene at the gate has, in this way, become a kind of inherited reading ritual, passed from one reader to another across generations of paperback editions.
The Witch-king's death matters for gender in fantasy because it does not merely add a woman to the ranks of heroes. It dismantles the assumption that the ranks themselves were ever properly drawn. Tolkien, a scholar of medieval literature as well as its modern inheritor, knew that the great war poems of the past had often rendered women invisible. His decision to give Éowyn her full name, her full grief, and her full voice in the moment of killing is therefore a quiet act of literary correction.
The scene still matters because it is unfinished business. Fantasy as a genre continues to struggle with the question of who may wield a sword and who may bear the prophecy. The Witch-king's fall reminds us that the answer has been available, in some form, since 1955. It is the inheritance of every reader who picks up the book today, in a Carlton basement or a Perth library, and feels the shape of the world shift a little when Éowyn raises her arm.
An essay I wrote about the desire of Tolkien and the TCBS to be a light to their darkening world. A century later, he still provides light. Thank you, Professor and God trade binary option bless! Art by Justin Gerard … Continue reading