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Originally Posted by Ivriniel
Yes. However, there's a premise missing.
The 'blade of Arnor' argument is a two-pronged position (pardon pun) not one of '...how bitterly...' "a" blade might hurt him. 1. Spell; 2. To target an invulnerability. Devised for it, in fact, it does seem.
The Arnor blade had a counter spell that attacked something specific in the Witchking. It was about the knitting of will to undead flesh. I don't recall normal metal ever having such an imbued property in the mythology. Do you? There's part of the invulnerability addressed, by a specific reference to Lore. You may argue what a normal blade would do, and if any effect can be imputed of 'any' blade to 'knitting' (I don't think it's easy to knit a scarf with a blade).  |
The blade didn't knit anything- it un-knit it.
Anyway, is your argument here that, since any effect *less* than "breaking the spell that knit his unseen sinews to his will" would be negligible, Merry's blade *may as well* have been the only one that could wound the Witch-king?
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This must imply, then that Glorfindel's prophesy was circumscribed, in, perhaps a discernment he missed. We found that Holbytlan and female downed him. That leaves us pondering what it is about Holbytlan and women that was different. There's a lot about Halfling 'fibre' and their general resistance to Evil, and about their hardiness of body. I'm not clear what it was that Tolkien was saying about men and women (lower case 'm' and 'w') that was at work that enabled Eowyn to do something no man in the many hundreds of years of wars with Arnor could.
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I have always taken it that Glorfindel meant, simply, that no man *would* kill the Witch-king, not that no man *could* kill him. That is, it's not that women and hobbits as groups possessed any innate Witch-king lethality, it's just that the individuals who killed him *happened* to be a woman and a hobbit. (Similarly, Macduff is not generally assumed to have had special Macbeth-killing powers as a result of being a Caesarian birth.)