About the connection of will to sinew, Ivriniel, I still think the meaning is more mundane than you are proposing. A deer "caught in the headlights" has had its will temporarily disconnected from its sinews (the two are no longer knit together), for example, and this for me explains why the Nazgul-lord does nothing to save himself from Eowyn (when he arguably had time to at least try and defend himself), as well as Tolkien's less poetic explanation in a letter, that if one of the Nine had been struck similarly at Weathertop, the wraith would have fallen down and the blade destroyed.
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Originally Posted by Ivriniel
Eowyn struck somewhere else--with a non-magical weapon (significant. Would her blade have done anything, without Merry's first blow.
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I think Eowyn's blade would have killed the Witch-king without Merry's strike. For me, Merry only made the wraith vulnerable to Eowyn in a tactical sense -- he could not will his body to avoid or parry her blow. Otherwise (it seems to me),
if the Nazgul-lord could only be stopped by such blades, and was invulnerable to other weapons, he becomes too powerful.
Sauron himself could be bodily slain, so could Morgoth. Limiting the Nazgul to a specific weapon makes him too strong in my opinion (he already has other advantages in battle), an arguable "plot hole" even.
My reading has been "no other blade" as in: no other blade
as it was employed here. In other words, even if a
mightier hand had struck
this particular wound (the reader already knows the particular circumstances described) with another blade, the wound would not have been so bitter. Why? Because
this blade didn't need a mightier hand, nor to be struck in a more lerthal spot, to end up being bitter, as the Nazgul-lord was ultimately brought down by it, given the nature of the dagger and what happened next.
Or more clearly perhaps: I believe the message here is, even if Imrahil or Boromir had wounded the wraith in the same way, any other blade however, would have resulted in a dead Eowyn and a wounded Nazgul-lord.
Making the Witch-king invulnerable to regular weapons is problematic in my opinion. Admittedly Tolkien does seem to suggest this earlier when Gandalf tells Legolas that his arrows could not have slain one of the Nine -- but it is also Gandalf who, earlier in the story, explains that the flood cannot kill the wraiths, because they stand or fall with Sauron...
... which I take to mean that they can be what we would call "killed", or hurt, but only ultimately slain if Sauron is undone. The felling of the Witch-king was a great deed within the context of this battle, but I think he might have returned at some future point; a theory made moot by the destruction of the One however.
So I think the wraiths would be "invulnerable" in this sense, but not in the sense that they could ride into a given battle and fear no regular sword, mace or spear. The latter seems too powerful in a practical sense, and to my mind makes the coincidence of Merry having the right kind of sword "too" coincidental.
It's already coincidental enough to have Merry bearing a sword that helped so greatly, but to have been bearing the only weapon that could either kill the wraith or make it vulnerable to regular weapons, is even a step further I think.