“You fool. No man can kill me.”
How many times am I allowed to reblog this before it gets weird?
Fun facts: Tolkien constructed this scene because he came out of Macbeth thinking that Shakespeare had missed a golden opportunity with the ”Be bloody, bold, and resolute; laugh to scorn the power of man, for none of woman born shall harm Macbeth” prophecy
Being letdown by Macbeth is apparently a significant factor in Tolkien’s writing because the Ent/Huorn attack on Isengard was the result of his disappointment that the whole “til Birnam Wood come to Dunsinane” thing was just some dudes holding sticks and not actual ambulatory trees.
And “Lord of the Rings is Actually A Shakespeare Fix-Fic” week continues here on Storming the Ivory Tumblr.
P.S. Eowyn is still my hero and if you try to tell me she is anything other than THE BEST I will CUT YOU DOWN.
My sadface when in the book it was Merry, who technically is not a Man, but a Hobbit. This was one of the best changes. But actually Hobbits ARE considered a race of man - in that they are mortal and when they die they die for realsies and not even Eru Ilúvatar knows where they get off to. (It is implied they go to The Real Heaven or Hell rather than sticking around as spirits in Pagan Middle Earth forever. Jesus allegories do not cut it for the real thing.)
It was Eowyn in the book as well. Merry helped, by stabbing the Witch King in the leg, but it was all Eowyn.
Also, her badass boast was even more badass:
“But no living man am I! You look upon a woman. Éowyn I am, Éomund’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.”
My favorite <3 <3 <3
I was disappointed that Merry was a guy, though, when I first had the books read to me as a kid. I heard his name as “Mary” and was like oh cool, there’s a girl on the team! Womp womp.
Fun fact: allacharade may have read the (first) Swedish translation of the work, infamous for retconning that scene (among other things).