Éowyn and the Witch King of Angmar

He is a Ring Wraith, the first and most powerful servant of Sauron, wearer of a Ring of Power, who can defeat his enemies with the sheer terror he sends into their hearts. And he can’t die, because he isn’t technically alive. She, on the other hand, is a twenty-four-year-old woman who has spent most of her life caring for an elderly uncle, and while she may have practised weapon skills, she is unlikely to be an accomplished fighter beyond the usual merit of her people. She certainly has no experience of battle. She doesn’t even have a magic sword. And yet she slays him? Just how did Éowyn manage to kill an entity that was indestructible?

It seems a good idea to look for a story-internal as well as for a structural explanation. Let’s start with the former.

The Witch King is a ghost. He has no body. That makes stabbing him a bit of a tricky business to say the least. According to Gandalf the ring wraiths exist on a different plane from the reality of the living. And, so he explains in “The Ring Goes South” (FOTR), they cannot be destroyed by ordinary means, because “the power of their master is in them, and they stand or fall by him” (my italics).  By this line of reasoning, it should have been utterly impossible to destroy the witch king while Sauron was in possession of the One Ring.

But then, as we all know, there is the prophecy:

“Far off yet is his doom, and not by the hand of man will he fall.” (ROTK, Appendix A)

And, so the common sense reasoning, because Éowyn is a woman rather than a man and because she is aided by Merry, who is also not a man, she is able to slay him and fulfil the prophecy.

However, this explanation does not withstand critical scrutiny, for a number of reasons. One of the things we ought to ask is how exactly this prophecy is supposed to work. Should we assume that Glorfindel’s words changed the physical make-up of the witch king, thus making him vulnerable to non-men where he had previously been invincible? This seems a ludicrous idea to me. But if Glorfindel’s words were not formative, were they then diagnostic? Did he, by some mysterious means of insight, simply perceive a vulnerability that the witch king had always had? Again, this would appear a very odd concept: a ghost who is immune to one specified group of people, but not to others. Why? How? It makes precious little sense to me.

The next thing that puzzles me is how both the witch king himself and pretty much everybody else in Middle-earth takes this prophecy to mean that the witch king cannot be killed at all. In general, this belief would be logical, given Gandalf’s explanation that he exists in a different reality and is bound to the power of the One Ring. But why people would take Glorfindel’s words as a confirmation of this is beyond me. After all, if he cannot fall by the hand of man, why not by the hand of elf, dwarf, hobbit or, indeed, woman? It doesn’t take a genius to think of these possibilities – and yet in over a thousand years none of those clever people like Gandalf or Elrond ever thought of it? Very strange indeed.

But let’s for a moment just accept the premise: he cannot be slain by a man, but he can be slain by a woman. This begs the question how exactly the sex of the sword wielder affects the outcome of the sword strike. Is it magic? Is it sheer will power? Is it psychology? Is it some kind of inverted self-fulfilling prophecy, i.e. does the witch king perish because he realises that he has been outwitted? How can the fact that the sword is wielded by a woman result in piercing and destroying a creature that is not technically alive and does not have a body?

And, as I said, it isn’t even a magic sword. Tolkien takes great pains to explain why Merry’s dagger was able to injure the witch king, namely because it was impregnated with magic spells against this very foe by the powerful people of the past. As an aside, one has to wonder why, if those people had such magic prowess, they did not manage to defeat the witch king? However that may be, the fact remains that Éowyn had no such weapon. She slew the witch king with an ordinary Rohirric blade. How? Just because she was a woman? That seems way too easy an explanation.

There is a psychological point. The main power of the witch king is a power of mind: he induces fear. Éowyn, however, is not scared. She is driven by love for her uncle and by a complete contempt of death. This explains how she can tackle him where others have fled in terror. Nevertheless, it does not explain how a piece of ordinary steel can pierce an entity that exists on a different plane of reality.

Tolkien indicates that the witch king was not ultimately, but only temporarily defeated. His voice “was never heard again in that age of the world” (ROTK, The Battle of the Pelennor Fields) – note that that age ended a couple of years later anyway, but never mind. The possibility of him rising again is suggested.  Interestingly, the items he leaves behind are crown, mantle and hauberk, but, crucially, not his ring. Did he take that with him? I wonder.

But even with this modifier in mind, the story-internal explanation does in my opinion not cut the mustard. It is, to be frank, rather lame. So there ought to be a really essential structural purpose to this whole issue, which I shall now examine.

What we have here is, of course, a classic literary topos: the invincible villain is overcome by the unexpected outsider whom nobody reckons with. It is a David-and-Goliath situation, ever popular in fiction and clearly popular with Tolkien. So one structural reason why Éowyn slays the witch king is that it is traditional and fulfils well established reader expectations. Furthermore, Éowyn’s triumph over the witch king neatly mirrors Frodo’s triumph over Sauron. The biggest enemy is overcome by the most unlikely kind of person, a hobbit, the second in command is defeated by the second most unlikely kind of person, a woman.

In this context I’d like to draw attention to the fact that LOTR is entirely written from some kind of frog perspective. There are six different POVs in the trilogy: Frodo, Sam, Merry, Pippin, Gimli – and Éowyn. (Where neither of these is present, the narrative voice is omniscient.) What the first five all have in common is that they are small. We never get into the heads of the big folk, the classic heroes, Aragorn, Boromir or Gandalf. It is one of Tolkien’s main points that the fate of the world often rests on the shoulders of people who might consider themselves weak and powerless. While Éowyn is certainly not small, she is a woman and therefore by the power of tradition and precedent not designed for heroic deeds. Including her into the group of frog perspective characters therefore makes sense, as does her rise to valour and renown.

Another common literary topos Tolkien uses here is one that is absolutely crucial to the plot. It is the topos of Achilles or of Siegfried, widely known in fictional works from sagas to fairy tales. The invincible enemy (or hero, depending on perspective) must have a vulnerable spot. In Tolkien these weak spots are Sauron’s Ring, Smaugs vulnerable spot on the belly and the witch king’s inability to resist women. Why is this necessary? Because otherwise the entire plot would fail. This type of story does not work with absolutely invincible enemies prowling about. If they cannot be overcome, then what’s the point? Hence they need the weak spot, but at the same time they should generate such an aura of invincibility that their prospective foes overlook the vulnerability. This is, of course, nothing but a clever survival strategy!

It has also occurred to me that the few females in LOTR each represent a classic model of womanhood: Goldberry, nature; Arwen, the romantic beloved; Galadriel, the fairy queen; Rosie, the domestic matron, Ioreth, the wise woman; and Éowyn, the Amazon. In a way, she makes the picture complete. Note that all these are “good” models of female roles. There are no evil witches in LOTR.

Conclusion: While the story-internal explanation fails to convince, there are strong structural reasons for Éowyn slaying the witch king. These are apparent in Tolkien’s use of literary topoi to support one of his main themes in the trilogy, namely the heroism of non-heroic people.