Let's Read Tolkien 68: The Battle of the Pelennor Fields

But it was no orc-chieftain or brigand that led the assault upon Gondor.

Everybody is still fighting. The Rohirrim have crashed through the enemy forces north of the Osgiliath road, and Théoden leads his knights in a charge on the Southron cavalry, and cuts down their leader and disperses them. Their triumph is cut short when the Witch-king returns on a flying beast and crashes down on Théoden; the king is pinned under his horse and his knights run away in terror. All except Dernhelm, and his hobbit baggage Merry. As Dernhelm faces the Witch-king, it turns out he's actually Éowyn, and apparently the Witch-king has heard the prophecy because he has a little think about it. After Éowyn kills his steed, he attacks, but is stabbed in the leg by Merry and destroyed by Éowyn.

Théoden, dying, names Éomer king, and his body and the wounded Éowyn are borne into Minas Tirith. The battle isn't over, though, and as Éomer takes command of the Riders, they see black-sailed ships coming up the Great River. Everyone thinks it's the Corsairs of Umbar, but when the flag of Elendil breaks out on the first ship, Éomer and gradually the others realize that it's Aragorn and the dúnedain. The enemy is routed.

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So here we are: the climactic battle of the Third Age and the Lord of the Rings. The Witch-king is dead; Théoden King is dead; Sauron's army has been wiped out. Thankfully, Tolkien built his battle narrative around the characters and their experiences. We even get Éomer as a point-of-view character for a bit. These are very powerful chapters with a lot going on, and I feel like anything I can write in this format and with the time I have available for this is barely going to scratch the surface. So my commentary feels even more random than usual. But here it is.

It's been opined to me that Éowyn slaying the Witch-king is somehow less meaningful because it fulfills a prophecy. I strongly disagree. Éowyn can only kill the Witch-king because of her exceptional valor: where all of Théoden's other knights fell or ran away, she stood alone against him. She knew nothing about a prophecy.

There's a tradition that King Harold's housecarls died defending his body at the Battle of Hastings, although I haven't actually found a source for it! This seems to have been connected to a wider, historical or not, Scandinavian/Saxon idea that a lord's bodyguard was expected to avenge his death, if not die themselves. Some idea like this was already present in the Hobbit, where Fili and Kili died defending Thorin's body (Chapter 18), and it will reappear at the Nírnaeth Arnoediad, in the Silmarillion, where the dwarves of Belegost carry their dead king from the field. The point here is that the retainer's loyalty to their lord transcends death. In staying to defend the dying Théoden, Éowyn is fulfilling this obligation, heedless of what happens to her. It's through this courage that she is able to strike his death-blow, but she doesn't know that. Éowyn is exemplifying Tolkien's notion of "northern courage": she's doing the right thing, even if it fails and leads to her death, because it's the right thing to do. Tolkien highlights how she is tested: unlike the others, she stays by Théoden; she defeats the Witch-king's mount; she withstands his blow and strikes back. It was by no means enough for her to just be there and have a sword.

Merry, of course, was not the first hobbit to try to stab the Witch-King. Back on Weathertop, Frodo went at the chief of the Ring-Wraiths with a barrow-knife, but missed. When Tom Bombadil sings the hobbits free from the wight's barrow, the text is quite explicit that each of the hobbits takes a barrow-knife. So the knife Frodo attacked the Witch-king with on Weathertop was similar to the one Merry had. Aragorn is apparently correct in surmising that Frodo missed because his knife survived the encounter, but seems to fail to realize that had Frodo hit, he might have done some actual damage. Aragorn wasn't making the best decisions at the time.

If you really get down to it, Saruman and Barliman Butterbur conspired to kill the Witch-king. If Saruman hadn't captured Gandalf and delayed him, and Barliman hadn't forgotten to deliver Gandalf's letter, the hobbits would have gone straight to Rivendell before the Black Riders found the Shire, never passing through the Old Forest and never picking up barrow-knives to stab wraiths with.

I haven't really talked about Tolkien's concept of eucatastrophe: a "good" catastrophe, or an unexpected event that stops what seemed to be an impending, unavoidable doom. Tolkien coined the word and uses the concept several times in his works. The example everyone keeps using is in the Sammath Naur, but I've always thought that Aragorn's standard breaking out on the black ships is the most definitive example, told excellently through Éomer's sudden change of mood and laughter.

Finally, Tolkien closes the chapter with a lament for the dead. I've said this several times, but I simply do not understand the critics who think these are Boys Own adventures where nothing bad ever happens. One of the main themes suffusing the Lord of the Rings is loss, and for all the glory and eucatastrophe of battle, that's what this chapter ends with.

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Next time: theology.