'Means the Elf, the Gnome, the Halflings, Ents, Unlaiden Swallows, and everything from Africanized Killer Bees to Wishbone with a vial of Hanta in his maw would?
Shittin’ me? Seriously. Let me consult my DM Guide… Yup, says right nere, "No man can kill the f-er, and like Armor +15 and shit.
And driving all 9 off Weathertop with a sword and a torch, 'cuz “No man can kill me”, (but I’m afraid of men with swords and fire, because if my cloak burns, I will be released from Sauron’s enslavement?).
And the ending, JarJarTolkien, nice that you have an army of dead; undefeatable shit. Seems to me, Salmon would have a shitload of dead “Orak Haiku” that he could have done the same thing…Oh, wait, then we would have the setup of Wolverine VS dude from Patriot Games, both immortal, fighting to the death in a battle where they both can’t die, by definition.
I don’t tend to stutter when I write my middle initial, bitch.
Hey SK, it’s just like Shakespeare. “No man born of woman . . .” and MacBeth gets his ass handed to him by MacDuff who was “from his mother’s womb untimely ripp’d”
I read that’s where JRR got the idea- he thought the “Hey, I was C-sectioned, and lookie over there at those people dressed up as trees!” interpretation was a cop-out, so he decided to have a prophecy twist that was techincally true. Also the woods really did get up and attack people.
'If Eowyn and the Witch-King had been pedants like the herb-master
of Minas Tirith, the dialogue might have gone more like this:
“You fool, no living man may harm me.”
“Distinguo, Sir, I am not vir but femina. Prepare to die.”
“Excuse me, your Westron is so imprecise. I did not mean vir, I
meant homo.”
“Ah, point taken! In that case, permit me to point out that
Meriadoc, who is not homo but dimidiulus, a Halfling, has
just introduced an Arnorian blade into your knee.” ’
Have people missed the fact that the Witch-King fell in the first place because Meriadoc stabbed him in the back of the knee with his sword? The Witch-King died at the hands of a womanp and a hobbit. But not a man.
As such, there’s another literary precedent besides Macbeth. Have a look at the death of Patroclus in the Iliad.
The prophecy (uttered by Glorfindel, so not anyone infallible) was not “no man can harm the Witch King,” but “not by the hand of man shall he fall.” Any man of suitable will and capability could have harmed the Witch King all along. What Glorfindel foresaw (presuming his utterance was actually prescient and not just lucky) was that by happenstance the hand that would cause the Witch King to fall wouldn’t belong to a man.
The thing is, in a place like Middle Earth that shouldn’t give the Witch King much confidence in being invulnerable. I mean, there’s plenty of elves and dwarves running around the place, even if you don’t take women into account and don’t know about hobbits. (There’s wizards, ents, eagles, and so on as well but they may not need to be considered for various reasons.)
Sure, but at that moment, with what he thought was a man in front of him, he had plenty of reason to be confident. Until she took off her helmet and was all YAH BITCH and then Merry shanked him.
I wonder if Glorfindel was just restating the hubris that the Witch King uttered at that moment - that he felt he was undefeatable by ‘any man’ (global) - and ‘most’ men would have cowered at him anyway in that instant - while Merry and Eowyn did not - making them not just “any man” but something a bit more special (leaving aside the in your face fact that niether of them were ‘men’).
Sauron himself was only defeated in the first war due to a ‘wild swing’ and not in the more conventional sense - had the swing not taken the Ring finger, then he would not have been defeated.
